COMBINE 2012: Annual Undergraduate Student Exhibition

Hélène Latulippe’s series calls upon the notion of memory, demonstrating how souvenirs have a strong, almost defining presence in human life. The viewer is faced with two types of images. On the one hand, we have large black stains, printed onto black Japanese washi paper, which represent the vast desertedness of the mind. On the other hand, we have a white background covered with tiny black etchings that form a round black circle in the middle. With minimal visual cues, the artist manages to captivate us, by letting us float inside our imaginations. 

The pieces are penetrating, hypnotic and eerie. We gradually come to anticipate that some dreadful truth will come to us, as we spiral deeper into our unconscious. Latulippe’s feelings of self-alienation are clearly translated through her creative process. It seems almost as though she etched or let seep onto the canvas her emotional past, forming a dense and dark agglomeration of her inner self. 

Her work goes far beyond the frames of the canvas, as we feel engulfed by the darkness, entering into the separate world that is our mind. The artist has managed to create images that retrieve painful emotions from our unconscious. They reveal to us these aspects about ourselves of which we weren’t necessarily aware. 

We can see through this work how defects of memory can also translate into losses of self-awareness, as demonstrated by the artist’s empty, circular marks. Eventually, their meaningfulness, like souvenirs, fades away for them to become large stains, each mark disappearing under the next layer. What the artist and viewer are faced with, is both the absence and trace of their past.