For twenty years, Kim Waldron has led a career that could be described as an undercover agent. She does not seek to flush out crimes, although… The flaws of an overly masculine world are often found in the crosshairs of her photographic projects. But not only that. The retrospective devoted to him by the Expression center in Saint-Hyacinthe examines with originality a practice anchored in reality, deliciously tinged with fabulation.
In the mode of self-representation, more than self-portrait — “it’s me and it’s not me,” she says, over coffee at the end of a Friday of meetings —, the he Montreal artist has embodied a thousand professions. When she started out, the clothes she borrowed from professionals (man in a suit and tie, priest, doctor, etc.) seemed too big for her. “I was twenty,” she says, barely embarrassed, about the series Working Assumption (2003), produced after four months spent in 2001 in very macho Paris.
His chameleon figure subsequently asserted itself. It has infiltrated the lives of couples (Triplets2009), taken part in the entire food chain (Beautiful Creatures2010-2013), aimed for the position of deputy (Public Office, 2014-2016). Finally, after being exported to China as a workforce (Made in Quebec, 2015), she has become a… moral person. The Kim Waldron Company Ltd., founded in 2023, is even the second company to bear his name.
The originality of the exhibition lies in its layout, a mixture of chronology and themes. Kim Waldron Ltd.: civil society also stands out because it is a product of the young company. It was born from the hands of three women (Louise Déry, Anne-Marie Ninacs, Michèle Magema) who play the role of commissioners and administrators.
“Artists work with curators to expand their practices, companies with boards of directors to be able to grow,” maintains Kim Waldron, who, by inviting these women — two well-established figures in the Quebec art world — to her business and a French artist — merged two worlds.
Creating a moral entity stems from her short-lived experience as a politician and her desire to criticize “the way political parties are [à la merci] corporations”. “People,” she said, “vote for parties, not for people. Becoming a corporation is moving towards that, it is pushing my research into self-representation. The company is a separate entity, with me at its head. »
The exhibition opens with a work in this emblematic sense: the short video Self-portrait (2017). What do we see there? Skyscrapers of a business district, with a furtive reflection in the artist’s foreground. Taken from a stay in Hong Kong, Self-portrait evokes a first company (theoffshore Kim Waldron Limited), which the artist dismantled because it was only hosting liabilities. It has not stopped targeting economic structures, but it now does so from here, by managing an active society which displays, among its values, an attachment to French as a working language.
Never alone
“I have the privilege of doing projects where I can travel, do residencies and insert myself into different contexts,” she says, in all humility. These contexts help me understand issues. I explore [mondes qui ne sont pas] my life. »
A natural attitude pushes Kim Waldron, an Anglo-Montrealer who strives to speak French, towards others. This is the common thread that runs through his twenty years of creation. The Concordia University graduate still wants to point out that if she teaches at UQAM today, it is for aesthetic reasons. “My hybrid practice is better suited to UQAM, where there is openness. At Concordia, it’s more fine arts [comprendre “classique”] », she comments.
The one who began with actions performed in front of and for the camera today notes that she has “expanded” her modus operandi little by little. Working Assumption deals with the time when “we are young, we don’t know what we want to do for work, we try to define ourselves”. She then assumed her position as an artist without fear of endangering her authority. Her projects, spiced up with “a little public and a little private”, take shape thanks to the individuals she meets.
Series Tripletsproduced in Vienna despite an initially difficult reception, was inspired by a classic of Austrian literature, Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann. “I came with an idea of this culture. These are the people who [ont défini] the project. »
Beautiful Creatures comes from her desire to participate in public debate and demonstrates, as she says, “an openness towards the idea of killing animals”. In his opinion, the only existing images criticized our carnivorous habits, never the opposite. Kim Waldron then takes a stand by “sharing the reality” of the food chain.
His voice intensified with his candidacy for the 2015 federal elections, in the riding of Papineau (that of Justin Trudeau). The highlight of the series Public Office, this is her portrait, a pregnancy well advanced under a slogan “Independent” with multiple meanings. “A pregnant woman on an electoral sign: put this image in the public space [tient] of the imagination,” she concedes, delighted to have been followed by a New York Democrat named Zephyr Teachout.
Defining oneself, making one’s place, fighting for better female representation in the spheres of power… The Waldron retrospective takes on the air of an investigation through multiple themes, from motherhood to sharing knowledge, including domestic tasks, paid work or agricultural production.
“To carry out each project, even if it’s me, I have to take on a role. It’s me and it’s not me. I only understood this over time. But everyone has a core [très] personal, comes from a reason that touches me, from a conviction,” she summarizes.