At Projet Casa, Caroline Mauxion presents a new body of work around an evocative title: dependent on desire. The UQAM graduate from France answers our questions.
A biographical dimension is essential in the new exhibition you are presenting. What explains this statement?
During my previous exhibitions, I already drew on my bodily experience linked to important orthopedic treatments undergone because of a malformation, but it is true that it is more assumed in the current work that I present at Project Casa. I explain it first by a concrete awareness of my physical condition in recent years, especially with the emergence of pain. In parallel, the liberation of speech and several readings led me to realize how much I had conditioned my body, hiding its experience, its limits, its sensations in order to belong to the norm. However, I’m not so much looking to tell my own story, but rather to explore how my body, its lived experience can inform my relationship to matter.
The photo prints on plaster and on fabric, the metal structures as well as the sculptures in colored plaster evoke skins or abused flesh and from scars still alive as much as, moreover, eroticizing surfaces. How does the practice of the different techniques bring you to address these topics?
Indeed, I thought of the body in its tangible dimension, in its flesh made of wounds, bruises, raw sensations, but also in its carnal dimension, made of desire. The medical approach in orthopedics tends to fragment the body, to isolate in order to better auscultate the part to be treated. Desire, on the other hand, runs through and invades the body in its entirety. It is intangible, fluid, like pain in the end, but, in my case, the emergence of desire allowed me to regain possession of this body that had been observed for a long time, diagnosed, felt, manipulated, opened and corrected.
In the different materials that I use, the transfers of photographs on plaster require a long process which consists of meticulously rubbing the surface with the fingertips in order to reveal the image. As for plaster casts, their finishing is also laborious, involving shaping, sanding and then coating them with wax. All these gestures can easily be related to the care that I lavish on them.
The forged metal rods hold for me a familiar orthopedic connotation, like the fixing pins that pierce the flesh to the bone, they are the structure, the skeleton of fragmented bodies. Orthopedics ensures that the motor mechanics of the body are functional. The works in the exhibition reveal precarious balances, friable materials, fragmented surfaces, sometimes supple as with fabric, which, put together, form a sensitive structure.
What does the architecture of Projet Casa bring to the presentation of your works?
The domestic dimension of the place promotes an intimate relationship and allows a certain promiscuity with the works. I read that in the 1960s the house was a small hospital. Imagining people being treated there can contribute to a new understanding of the place and the works. Moreover, certain works in their title and in their form refer directly to domesticity, but also to the universe of care.