Description
Poésie de passage presents a poem in two parts. Installed on the floor is a poem written by the artist made of letters cast in paper and raised off the ground on pins (see the poem below). Installed at the base of a window are sheets of handmade paper with stenciled, cut-out letters placed upside down, that read “Ma seule stabilité, l’instabilité” (My only stability, instability).
The window of the gallery was important to the work. It allowed the artist to position the two parts of the work so that as sun moved across the sky, the light passing through the work in the window and the shadows cast by the work on the floor crept into the gallery space, the light of one stretching into the shadows of the other.
A version of Poésie de passage was presented in at her 2001 exhibition “Runoutta ohi mennessä”, at Taidehalli: Kunsthalle in Helsinki, Finland. Another was presented at La Biennale du dessin, de l’estampe et du papier, 1997. Karen Trask won the Abitibi-Price Paper Prize for this work. It was also reworked and presented as Under the Tree in India.
Text from the work in French:
Poésie de passage
Une pluie de mots
ombre et lumière
se place, se déplace.
Recherchons le noir sur blanc
Dans ce va-et-vient
Comme une preuve de passage –
un sceau d’immutabilité
Avancent des pas d’ombres, chasseurs de lumière.
Se retourne,
la lumière marche dans l’ombre
L’un fait lire l’autre
Tout bouge
Tout passe
Statement
Because of the interaction with the natural light, I thought of the site-specific installation of Poésie de passage as a phenomenological activation of the ideas presented in the text of the poem. It was also inspired by my understanding of languages as ephemeral and alive.
Karen Trask, 2024
