These sanded pages project a faint but insistent sculptural presence: worked at like marble, as matte tiles of absorbed light bearing glossy traces of the original paper coating, they remind us that Jodoin has shown a constant preoccupation with the surface properties of her materials. She leads us to apprehend even more closely our own effort in knowing: sound of breath, aching of step, halting again at each page (on foot, or in a wheelchair\u2026 there is no uniform or normative body presumed as Jodoin\u2019s reader or viewer). Working away at the very experience of the book, she invites us to recognize and question the limits of its conventions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jodoin had set out the terms of this engagement with the installation une certaine instabilit\u00e9 \u00e9motionnelle<\/em> (Battat Contemporary, Montreal, 2015): then, as now, table structures support our encounter with the drawings; references to the body are made through text and image in ways that remind us that the borders between the two are also matters of convention. Well known for her fluent understanding of the human body through drawing and her \u201cmetavisual\u201d engagement with surfaces of iconographic and textual reproduction, Jodoin leaves the body\u2019s forms aside on this occasion to reach instead to the subjectivity that we carry within (and as) our bodies. Burrowing toward phrases, resequencing them to form a narrative, her sanding, finding, and isolating actions discard the original order of the deconstructed manual. We attend to the \u201cshe\u201d whose existential vagaries we encounter, follow, embroider, and make our own. Jodoin discloses her to us by listening closely, eliciting this narrative that was always lurking (among countless others) within the textbook, scattered fragments that she has retrieved so as to suggest patterns of discontinuous cross-readings that reveal her to be \u201cher\u201d first listener.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this reassembly, photographs remain only as vestigial surfaces of ink\u200a\u2014\u200aroughly gathered within phantom edges\u200a\u2014\u200athat from time to time interrupt the page\u2019s surfaces, tending to an incipient figuration as pulses of unresolved meaning that nestle in Jodoin\u2019s inquiring and responsive visual grammar. The artist\u2019s hands and eyes are here coordinated to release a sustained human presence, one that is always spoken of and spoken for outside of the recourse to \u201cI,\u201d nevertheless assuming identity, fear, strength, precariousness, a presence shown to have the possibility of will. \u201cShe\u201d may or may not ever come to know<\/em>, in accord with the imperative\/subjunctive play of the title; we accompany this resilience with fragments of phrase, injunction, excerpt, detail, evocation. Recovered from their deep embedding, from their infratextual moorings, they are left behind in a process of erasing that undoes the codes and constructions of prescriptive text.<\/p>\n![\"jodoin_il](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/90_CR03_Hardy_05_jodoin_il-faut-quelle-sache-2-scaled.jpg\")
il faut qu\u2019elle sache<\/em>, installation view, Arprim, Montr\u00e9al, 2017.
Photo : \u00a9 \u00c9liane Excoffier, courtesy of the artist
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