EMMANUELLE LEONARD at Gallery 44 (401 Richmond West), to October 8. 416-979-3941. See listing. Rating: NNNN
CSI-style forensic snapshots, grainy surveillance video, newspaper crime story illustrations: these are sources for Emmanuelle Léonard’s A Judicial Perspective, a provocative show of selections from recent projects in her ongoing investigation of the intersection of the justice system and photographic representation.
The Quebec-based photographer uses a variety of strategies to achieve an artless, deadpan aesthetic. Reminiscent of recent work exhibited at Contact documenting apparently healed-over sites of violent events, the series Une Sale Affaire looks obliquely at crime scenes that Léonard accessed by following reporters: the bland exterior of a suburban house (a shooting scene) or a cop car parked under a bridge (a drowning).
For Homicide: détenu vs détenu, she takes an archival approach, exhibiting a grid of small black-and-whites, actual police evidence photos now in the public domain that she obtained from the Palais de Justice in Quebec City.
A few images of the dorm-like cell where a prisoner killed his cellmate have the lurid blood spatter familiar from TV, while others focus on strange details like the cute penguin-print blanket on the bunk bed.
Léonard also turns her camera on the law enforcers in novel ways. In the ironically titled Les Citoyens, instead of capturing dramatic events at a 2009 protest, she makes big head shots of Montreal officers, young actors for the state standing alert and expressionless in riot helmets.
Using a hat-mounted camera, she watches the watchers to create Guardia, a kind of surveillance video in reverse, a three-channel projection of short slow-mo black-and-white snippets in which she surreptitiously approaches security guards at street markets and police in public plazas in Mexico.
Curated by Ryerson’s Gaëlle Morel, this thoughtful show asks us to question conventional depictions of crime and our voyeuristic taste for the consumption of violence as news and entertainment.
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