Amanda Earl on michèle provost

For many years I have adored michèle provost. She is my kindred in whimsy, imagination, play and versatility.

In her artistic statement, Gatineau, Québec multi-media artist michèle provost explains that she is concerned with the fleeting and the mundane, the little moments and simple thoughts that often get lost in an otherwise overpowering and frantic life. Her “statements are expressed in assemblage pieces and installations which are freely associative, emotionally charged, and sensually designed.” She is concerned with the relationship between “words and visual meanings.”

I don’t remember exactly when we met, but I’ve known of her work since the mid-aughts at the group exhibit “ABSTrACTS/RéSuMÉs: An Exercise in Poetry,” a text made from a compilation of words appropriated from critical writing(s) found in art magazines and curatorial essays. The collaborative exhibition at the Ottawa Art Gallery in 2010 included responses by local writers Sandra Ridley, jwcurry, John Lavery, Pearl Pirie, Carmel Purkis, and Grant Wilkins.

The work resonated for me because of its largesse, splendour, and defiance against the conventional art world, particularly one piece which was a collection of words on tags hanging on a wall. The work was an artistic rendering of text, which felt like visual poetry. It’s always difficult to define visual poetry because it blurs the boundaries of art and literature in its creation and interpretations. My own forays into consciously making visual poetry began in 2005 when I started to use the digital program MS Paint to match letters of the alphabet to the way they appeared in my mind due to my grapheme synaesthesia. I enjoyed working closely with individual letters, shaping, distorting, and colouring them. I learned of the term visual poetry and encountered the work of Judith Copithorne, Gary Barwin who were working at that time primarily by means of the computer.

I believe Provost’s work was the first I’d seen that engaged materially with language. I, too, am concerned with the grey area between language and image, something I started to ponder way back in a first-year linguistics class with Elizabeth Cowper at the University of Toronto in 1982 when she taught us Saussure’s linguistic sign, a unit composed of our image of something (signified) and its representation in our minds (signifier). This is the basic element of my engagement with visual poetry.

Visual poetry is the extraction of text from convention and incorporation into other media. Provost’s work definitely does that. In ABSTrACTS/RéSuMÉs, for example, text appears on tags hanging from the wall, giving this voluminous sense of abundance, a crowd of words such as “lying” and “jade. “

In “Vocabulaire,” Provost uses embroidery to create maps of words that have been lost in the jargon of urban language. I love Provost’s use of craft in her work. For Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry published by Timglaset Editions and edited by yours truly, one of my quests was to find women who have often been erased from the fields of art and literature because they used techniques such as sewing, knitting, painting and ceramics, which is considered craft and often excluded from the art world. Visual poetry is often excluded from the literary world as well, so it fits neither in the art or literary world.

Once I had the pleasure of visiting Provost at her home where she showed me all kinds of fascinating projects she had worked on and was working on. One that stays in my memory is Speed Reading, she made a collection of concrete poetry from the first letters of lines of literary works, including Sandra Ridley’s Post-Apothecary. In this work, Provost plays with space on the page through overlapping and large-size letters, while also maintaining some semblance of linearity.

Another one of her projects was to create a short story abstracted from conversations with Ian Kerr, and dedicated to his memory. Ian Kerr was in Provost’s words, “Philosopher king, dedicated law professor, and expert human being.”

Whenever I encounter Provost at an event, she is wearing handmade clothes that also seem like they are art to me. When we have had tea together, we bounce off each other, discussing our various projects, and being inspired by the other to create new ideas.

I have always been enthralled with Provost’s work, and one of her areas of play that I particularly enjoy are her mash ups and remixes. I remix all the time too, concentrating primarily on remixing found text to create poems. Provost has been remixing from the world of music, combining song lyrics with images from all kinds of sources, including comic books. One of these projects, “deep fakes, standardized norms for female approximation,” engages with the way the female body is seen, https://mprovost.ca/en/project/deep-fakes.”

There’s so much play and joy in Provost’s work. Check out the video for “Blocs Pop, un jeu de construction,” in which she’s placed pop culture icons such as Marilyn Monroe on children’s construction blocks and done an animation of their movement into and out of a box that resembles the kind of boxes of kids toys.

In works like “Shit Luck, A Book on Disaster” or Abstracting the Future, a book on AI or “Please Don’t Fuck Up My World, an Urgent Plea.”

https://mprovost.ca/en/project/please-dont-fuck-up-my-word, Provost offers both tongue-in-cheek commentary and humour, something we vastly need at this time. I highly recommend visiting michèle provost’s site to get an idea of the breadth, depth, play and variety of her work. It’s breathtaking.

 

 

 

Amanda Earl is a pansexual polyamorous feminist writer, visual poet, editor, and publisher who lives on Algonquin Anishinaabeg traditional territory.

Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca, editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, Sweden, 2021) and fallen angel of AngelHousePress.

Her poetry books include Beast Body Epic (AngelHousePress, 2023), Trouble (Hem Press, 2022), and Kiki (Chaudiere Books, 2014; Invisible Publishing, Canada, 2019).

In 2024 a digital chapbook entitled Seasons, an excerpt from Welcome to Upper Zygonia will be published by Full House Literary.

More information is available at AmandaEarl.com and https://linktr.ee/amandaearl. You can also subscribe to her newsletter, Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for updates on publishing activities, chronic health and financial issues.