Collections Detail – MAC Montréal

Jocelyne Alloucherie, *Les Tables de sable III (haute, rouge, rompue)*, © Jocelyne Alloucherie • Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay

Artist: Jocelyne Alloucherie
Title: Les Tables de sable III (haute, rouge, rompue)
Dimensions and medium: Plywood, wood, acrylic, lacquer, varnish, sand, and 4 silver prints, 1/1, Variable dimensions according to the exhibition space
Artwork description: Part of a body of work titled Paysages généraux, developed in the early 1990s by Jocelyne Alloucherie, the installation Les Tables de sable III (haute, rouge, rompue), is composed of a large sculptural component and a series of four photographs hung in a row on an adjacent wall. Voluminous and sombre, the three-part architectonic structure is joined by two perpendicular elements that form a kind of narrow “table” covered in dark sand. Its monumental scale impels viewers to move around the room, thus adding a temporal and spatial dimension to the experience. The spread of sand evokes a hilly landscape that emerges at the end of a journey, its form gradually building both physically and mentally. On the wall, black and white silhouetted images—vaguely reminiscent of vegetation—oscillate between the abstract and the figurative. These photographs extend the ambiguous references to nature and architecture, while referring to an aesthetic and fragmented conception of landscape conditioned by Western visual culture. By referencing photographic concepts such as point of view and framing, and through the deployment of objects that are both familiar and mysterious, Jocelyne Alloucherie orchestrates a system based on archetypes which, without making any direct references, operate slippages of meaning that feed the imagination.

Jocelyne Alloucherie

Les Tables de sable III (haute, rouge, rompue), 1995

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