Sabrina Chamberland attributes her aesthetic to the influence of local photographer Chantal Gervais, while referring to Julia Kristeva’s writing on abjection. Corporeal expresses this unsettling absurdity through the fragmentation of the human body and the powerful distancing of portrait subjects from their identities.
In her sensitive approach to subject and statement, Chamberland exposes the details of our bodies – the hairs, saliva, pores and wounds – but with a clinical separateness. These details must be concealed, glossed over, they are taboo, and yet they are ordinary, necessary, and even helpful. This puts us in a conflict with our sterilized expectations of the human body, where these unsightly realities are impossible to ignore.
Wounds and roughness are considered impurities, the body’s natural reactions and intimate climate is thought defective. The ideal is given to the impossible body – the inert, unfleshly corpse of airbrushes and dreams. The human body is, after all, the most intimate witness and conduit for our existence, so why do we experience it at such a great distance?
See all work in this exhibition
March 12 - April 19, 2015
Vernissage: Thursday March 12, 2015
