Description
D’eux is a diptych of colour photo lithographs. The images used for both are photographs taken by the artist at a cabane à sucre in rural Québec in the late eighties. The image on the left is of a Madonna figurine broken at the feet and perched on a nail hammered into the wall of the cabane à sucre. The image on the right shows an advertising sculpture of a “Bonhomme 50”, a popular marketing campaign for Labatt 50 beer c.1950-1960. Bonhomme 50 is also broken and missing a leg. In both photos the artist has placed a stylized figurine of a small girl, which she made out of clay.
Statement
The title D’eux has a double meaning. “D’eux” in French means of them, as in “c’est d’eux”, it belongs to them. Spoken it also sounds like “deux”, as in the number two.
D’eux was a consideration of my identity and how I fit in as someone new to Québec culture. The work presents the dichotomy of two popular québécois cultural icons: one male and one female, one related to revelry and the other to religion, both outside of my experience. The southern-Ontario rural Protestantism I grew up in had nothing to do with the Virgin Mary, and my family was mostly temperance, so there was very little drinking.
Yet there was something beyond just the shared rural cultures that connected me. “The fact that the Bonhomme 50 is missing a leg was symbolic for me because my father lost his left leg in a farming accident. It was symbolic for me to put a figurine of young girl under his left leg because he was always asking for help. So in some respects I felt like that little girl holding him up.”
The D’eux diptych puts forward the core consideration of anyone adopting a new culture. How am I separate? And how am I the same?
Karen Trask & Don Goodes, 2024
