The exhibition Trial Proofs features a transfixing series of works including photography and video that the artist Élène Tremblay has created to counter the slick, easily-consumed images of the perfect bodies in the mass media.

As an alternative, Tremblay seeks postures and conditions that make the body pathetic in order to give it emotional resonance. Abject and isolated, the figures in her work appear in the abeyance of a trial. The situations depicted in her photographs are amplified and intensified by the manipulation of time in her video loops. The brevity and repetition of her videos recall the techniques used in film studies and in ethnography to analyze imagery and human behavior.

This exhibition creates an analytical time and space, making it possible to grasp the many facets of the social fact shown and, through fiction, to explore perceptions of the self and others in a social context. There is a subtle theatricality to these images, in their strategies of altering the pace of perception and the duration of observation, and in their highlighting of the constructed nature of the experience of the work.

Trial Proofs will feature photographs taken in Kingston that contribute to Tremblay’s ongoing photographic series Les assis / The Sitters. The individuals portrayed in the series appear to have dropped out of the ongoing rush of everyday life. The position Tremblay assigns to the viewers of these images is intended to reflect certain aspects of modern sensibilities: “passivity, paralysis, powerlessness, voyeurism, distraction, etc.”