This exhibition features a new video-projection, Paramour (1998), produced for the Belkin Gallery by Montréal artist Geneviève Cadieux. The work is based on an archetypal dialogue between a man and a woman, from a passage in The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras. The work startles with its seeming declaration that love and desire are impossible, but then opens up into other issues in the show and to the cinematic underpinnings of Cadieux’s photographs.

Cadieux’s works demands a certain endurance from their viewers. They provoke strong, conflicting emotions (fear/euphoria, desire/repression, articulation/silence…) and raise questions about the body, desire and gesture that all point to a crisis in subjectivity. These very large scale images of the human body, face and landscape impose a kind of claustrophobia—forcing us too close—but also promising an oceanic feeling of release and openness.