Différentes voix
Patrick Javault is welcoming Latoya Ruby Frazier and Abigail DeVille.
La Toya Ruby Frazier was born and raised in Braddock, a former industrial town near Pittsburgh. She still spends part of her life in a place that was devastated when steel factories started to close down one after another. Inspired by the work of the masters of American documentary photography, she chose to work on parallel portraits: that of a line of women—herself, her mother (Mom) and her grandmother (Grandma Ruby, who passed away in 2009)—taken as a single entity, and that of her city. She both questions Braddock’s history and acts for its future as she testifies to prevailing racism and social inequalities. The lives of this line of women, their bodies, their way of living together belong to Braddock’s history, just as Braddock’s history registers in them—including through the effects of its environment on their health. La Toya Ruby Frazier, who also uses video and performance, brings back to life political black and white photography, which she crosses with the staging of her daily life in a subtle and intriguing manner.
Abigail DeVille, who openly acknowledges the influences of Kienholz, Kabakov or Hirschhorn, creates installations out of various objects and materials, mostly in situ. These installations mix the personal and the general, putting together a collective portrait, exposing the continuity of policies that exclude and oppress, bringing avant-garde and social chaos to collide. These devastated environments form a compact set of individual and collective narratives. To some degree, they may be compared to archeological work. Abigail DeVille extends the concept of invisibility, which writer Ralph Ellison first applied to the Black community, to the downgraded, the down-and-out and other dropouts whom society has chosen not to see. Going even further, she ventures that “[T]he outsider sees Black feminist creativity as a dark hole from which nothing worthy can emerge, and in which each and every thing has to settle for a nonexistent volume of emptiness that results from the intense pressure of belonging to the wrong race, the wrong class and the wrong gender—hence our invisibility.”
The simultaneous presence in Paris of La Toya Ruby Frazier and Abigail DeVille, on the occasion of their respective exhibitions at Galerie Michel Rein, made this public discussion an opportunity we could not possibly pass up.
