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Voyage into the Interior
- Extending the Painted Image 1996
Dunlop Gallery, Sherwood Village Branch, Regina
Mapping the Journey
Exhibition text by Dr. Barbara Pezalla Powell
Women, historically, have written few autobiographies. They
have, however, recorded their life stories in other forms: they
have written diaries, kept scrapbooks, compiled family histories,
and told stories to their grandchildren.
Antoinette Hérivel, like many women, has chosen to create
an unconventional autobiography, using a variety of artistic
techniques. To high art traditions and methods of domestic ornamentation
she has added bits and pieces of her own memorabilia, including
her own diary.
An autobiography cannot be simply a mirror of the self. What's
hidden, forgotten, or deliberately left out is also part of
the story. Women autobiographers, in particular, write their
selves in hiding, mixing their revelations with omissions and
silences. Any autobiographical project, then, is paradoxical,
since it hides as much as it reveals, and records a journey
without arrival.
Antoinette Hérivel's journey is a sea change. Each of
the pieces of furniture suggests one aspect of the artist's
life journey. They are linked by an ocean path which sweeps
with tides of memory and emotion. The map Antoinette Hérivel
has drawn in this installation is a ritualized journey of exploration
of female domestic and psychic spaces.
She has turned the subject of her self into objects; her autobiographical
story is inscribed, built, and painted onto, in, and around
the material objects that furnish women's domestic spaces. Many
women diarists and autobiographers seem to write without a body:
for them, the body is absent, leaving an empty space where the
physical self remains unrecorded. Antoinette Hérivel
challenges this feminine decorum by referring directly to attributes
and processes of her own body - blood, hair, clothing.
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