Sentimental Jamboree: Exhibition text commissioned by Margaux Dewarrat for her solo exhibition at Lokal.Int, Bienne

2024

Dear Margaux, 

In the first series of photos you sent me, there’s a sheet of glossy blue paper with some words cut out. First I see it lying flat on a wooden floor, held down by books on each corner, and then I see it rolled up, two cut-out T’s almost lining up to one another. You photographed both states – wanted to capture both. I wonder if, like me, you’re often reluctant to fix things down, lingering instead with the open possibility of work in progress – still movable, rollable – all the different arrangements and combinations things could be. 

Language can be generous in this sense: its simultaneous capacities for specificity and vacancy, the familiar and the universal. The word 'rose' is the word 'rose', wrote Ulises Carrión. It means all the roses and it means none of them. Your cut-outs of the signs and symbols of daily life take on this kind of all-and-nothing freedom too. Logos, slogans, packaging, window stickers, snippets of language stuck in your head like the hook of a pop song – once plucked from their original contexts and cut into coloured silhouettes they enter a shared, mutual scale. They form their own new language, a vernacular – they begin to talk amongst themselves. The rhyming loops and legs of bows and scissors, petal flaps and shirt collars in rhythmic repetition. 

Later you show me everything arranged in a tight, jagged line like a row of bright shop windows: voisinage, you write, a neighbourhood. The babbling grammar of signs, images and colours that stream past as one cycles down a familiar high street. Hairdressers, dry cleaners, florists, charity shops. I think about the joyful free-flow between advertising, print patterns and biblical verse in the silk-screens of Sister Corita Kent, the pleasure of collecting for the sake of collecting, the paper-thin whimsy of desire while shopping – how much of the delight is actually just the sight of things laid out before you in rows and piles and stacks? – How often do those trinkets retain their aura when taken home? Sentimental Jamboree, sings Paul. Broken-hearted jubilee. 

Is sentimental also a bit of a snub word in French? Or is it just the English who get the ick from feeling too much feeling? I don’t think your works are sentimental in that way but their bows, flowers and doilies do prompt a nostalgic thought for the girlish desires I used to feel in the aisles of my local crafts and stationery store. Sequins, ribbons, stickers, glitter pens, stencils and papers of all kinds. At the counter an old man would slip my selection into a pinstriped paper bag with a zig-zag cut edge, carefully folding and securing the opening with a piece of frosted sellotape torn from a heavy brown tape dispenser. I remember those bags and the tape much more than the things inside. 

Do you think of the cut-outs as nostalgic? As silhouettes are they always gesturing towards some lost object – the thing that cast their shadow – or are they cut loose? What I like most about them is the way the uniformity of digital fonts and vectors get marred by imperfectly cut edges made by hand-held blades: a jagged circle dotting an i, a serif flick snagged and pressed back on itself. Perhaps as words and symbols they’ll always point to an absent elsewhere, but as material things they point back at themselves too. Or maybe it’s like what Pati Hill said about image and text in her photocopy works, that they can “fuse to become something other than either”.

Anyway, I’ll see you later :-) 

Bryony 

x