Le modèle - a solo exhibition curated by FRAC Bretagne for Rendez-vous à Saint=Briac, France

Sharon Kivland is an artist who collects, a gleaner in search of a feminine imagery that could be called popular. Using images (engravings from old journals, postcards, illustrations, and photographs from women’s magazines) and contemporary texts e, under the double illumination of clothing and literature, the artist draws an image of a woman between stereotype and emancipation. (Catherine Elkar) The exhibition Le Modèle presented in the former presbytery of Saint-Briac forms an introduction to the summer exhibition Armel-Beaufils, le regard des femmes, which will be presented from 1 July to 3 September 2017, curated by Sharon Kivland A SHORT RESUMÉ In the first room foxes carry books by Marx in their jaws, wearing the cap of liberty, echoed in a group of drawings of citoyennes elegantly coated for street action, and no doubt contained by the girdles with fox tails. They are accompanied by citoyens, which makes the girdles somewhat troubling to consider. There are women doubled and haunted. There are echoes across space and time. Women in negligées and underwear extracted from the pages of French lingerie magazines of the 1950 may be ‘femmes folles de leur corps’, as Karl Marx adds in a footnote to Capital (Chapter II, ‘The Process of Exchange’), comparing commodities with women, citing a twelfth-century French poet who come across ‘wanton’ women among other goods on view and for purchase at a fair. The women in the drawings and photographs look away for the most part, though some meet the viewer’s regard. Some look down, while others hide their faces, but not in shame, despite the very feminine mode of display, which some might consider as masquerade (posing as a woman while being something else, as in any act assumed to be a seduction). In the magazines the women are models, objects that carry another object to the market place. The distinction between public and domestic space is evident in the two artists’ studios, two regimes of production divided by a measure, a radical standard raised at a moment when subjectivity changed forever. In the second room there are women in négligés and in bed-jackets (liseuses), copied faithfully once more. The women are reading Marx (one may assume) in their boudoirs. The red ribbons around their necks and the red covers of their reading matter indicate something more is at stake than indolence and luxury. They are observed by a number of foxes, naturalised (as the French say; that is, more natural than Nature, and good citizens) who hold the constraining corsets designed for little girls. Bodies are constrained and fashioned. Yes, bodies and subjects are produced. It is unclear if the foxes are the liberators and educators, or if there has been an act of violence, wrenching the garment or book from a body or bodies by force, an exchange that the women – if they are commodities – cannot do for themselves. The foxes, too, are things, objects rather than the animate beings they were once, yet they are brought again to life in this new encounter, capricious, sportive, endowed with life, like wanton women. Perhaps they are going to the market on their own, in their own right, and if so, then social organisation is subject to change (if the dead, animal or woman, starts to speak, moves, acts).