In the Studio with Myriam Dion

INTERVIEW

Published Feb 4, 2021

Myriam Dion, Cortège floristique - California Blazes, The Wall Street Journal, Saturday/Sunday, August 22-23, 2020, 2020, Newspaper and japanese paper collage cut with X-Acto knife, 33 x 33 in.

How has working with installation changed the way you approach your two dimensional pieces?

When working with installations I am exploring new possibilities by taking my two-dimensional work out of the frame and immersing the viewer in the experience. Installation is a way for me to approach the subjects that I explore in my two-dimensional works in a more subjective way, which offers more avenues of interpretation for the viewer. In this sense, I think that my installations breathe new life into my two-dimensional works. They encourage me to explore new themes, as well as new techniques such as the use of Japanese papers, dyeing processes, folding techniques to cut the paper in several layers, and perfecting my way of making the collage joints to expand the dimensions of my pieces. Improving my knowledge and techniques through installations helps me to make my two-dimensional newspaper works more complex.

What is your process when selecting an article to work with?

My creative process begins when I adopt an open-minded and inventive attitude to find content that inspires me. I take my time to find the newspapers, the articles I choose have images and topics that trigger my imagination and influence my process. They guide me, by what they evoke with their photographic quality and their political content. Before even cutting the paper, I have a vague idea of the finished piece, but because the process takes time it allows me to change my mind as I work. In fact, the image develops itself at the same time I’m making it.

How does your practice respond and archive significant world events?

I would say that my practice is a way of digesting them. It is a precise selection, a way of slowly crystallizing a tiny part of the events that shape our world by transforming them into a work of art. It is also a method for me to take the time to form an opinion, or to learn about the story with reliable sources, and to enhance my knowledge of them at the same time. It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by the mass of images and information that are constantly pouring and that we are constantly consuming, sometimes in spite of ourselves. I think it's been especially heavier over the past year - we're spending even more time on social media, listening to daily press briefings, trying to disentangle right from wrong and the pandemic is taking over many other major global issues that I have the power to highlight through my artistic practice.

Can you speak more on the importance of collage to your conceptual practice?

I started doing collage about 7 years ago when I was doing my Master's in Visual and Media Arts at Université du Québec à Montréal. By multiplying the same images several times in a work, I developed a strategy to make the repetitive quality that is already present in my work more complex. In addition, this repetition works to emphasize the serial nature of the newspaper, which is mass-printed. This allows me to go beyond the conventional framework of the newspaper, to take it out of its linearity and to give it a unique form that contributes to its metamorphosis. The newspaper as an object has a familiar character through its banal mass-produced material, but it becomes new through the silvery treatment and look I give it. In addition to paper cutting, this strategy of juxtaposing copies inserts a second process in my practice, which occupies an essential place in the making of large-format works.

When referring to the history of art in the twentieth century, collage is part of a dynamic movement that evolved on the side of the random, the unfinished, the eclectic and hazardous. My work overturns the usual practice of collage because of the "finished" and applied aspect that emerges from my pieces, as well as by the structured composition of the rigorously calculated copies - there is not a lot of place for accidents or mistakes. In addition, I perform the gluing with extreme precision and I conceal the joints by covering them with cut patterns. The precise organization and the camouflage of the traces create a reversal of the traditional use of collage in the history of art. 

My practice reinforces this reversal of the typical implementations of collage, because the cutting work depends on what the collage creates as a surface for the cutting. Although my practice is primarily based on a cutting technique, and despite my efforts to hide the seams, collage is now a necessity in the production of my pieces. In my opinion, hiding it contributes to a slow reading of the work, encouraging the viewer to look closely and discover a second level of reading where it is possible to understand the stages of making the work. While my practice overturns some formal aspects of the history of collage, I still recognize myself in the deconstruction and construction work of collage artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Man Ray, John Heartfield and Max Ernst. I join in their research of images or texts, and in a similar process, in my daily newspaper collecting. I resort to the fragmentary and the collage gives me the impression of an "artisanal" approach. I associate it with an economy of means and an activity of the hand, which corresponds with my desire to enhance manual know-how.

You’re currently doing a residency at NARS Foundation in New York, what are you currently working on or researching while in New York?

In recent years, I have acquired several old copies of North American newspapers, some of them reporting on a landmark event in which a woman acts as the main protagonist. This thematic collection has guided my research and reflections on the perception of women's social status and media treatment of women. For a long time, and even today, the print media has been a forum articulated by and for the male sex, where women have occupied a limited place and interestingly enough, the newspaper articles I have accumulated document the perception of women in the mass media over the last century. 

In their pioneering 1978 feminist essay "Waste Not, Want Not : An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled - Femmage", artists Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer raised the issue of the lack of awareness of the status of visual creations resulting from activities and techniques traditionally practiced and employed by women, such as collage, assembling, cutting or even photomontage, inventing the neologism "femmage", a category that made it possible to extricate these "minor" art forms from a reductive straitjacket and encourage their revaluation. 

As a woman artist and in view of the techniques I use, my production is part of this artistic continuity in that it also establishes a parallel with the concepts of aesthetics of the "feminine" and the "decorative". The latter will serve as theoretical and conceptual points of reference for a part of my production in 2021, in which I wish to revisit and update the concept of "femmage" by creating a series which I have already started, with works on Emmeline Pankhurst and Isabella Goodwin, which I have just completed at the NARS residency. Coming to New York, I also wanted to take the opportunity to look for rare old newspapers related to the city, and I found two that I would like to work on during my residency, including one announcing the opening of the MET museum. I also take advantage of this very stimulating stay to visit galleries, discover what is happening on the visual arts scene in NYC and create relationships with the artists of the residency.

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