Jeu de cordes 2, 2006
digital print
66 x 91 cm

When the ties we weave with others knot like threads twisted in a tapestry, much patience is required in order to disentangle the snags and smooth them, once again, into harmony. Yet afterwards, the loosened threads no longer stretch as taut. They fall slack and continue to hold the undulating traces of the knots that were undone. If it is true that art is a sublimation — that is to say: art is a means of resolving the troubles of the psyche — then the representation of knots and bonds would be an obvious artistic manifestation of that (wishful) resolve. Julianna Joos threads imagery of attachment and detachment throughout her exhibition using a variety of techniques including collagraph, digital printmaking, and Jacquard weaving.

The Nodal Imprint
The jute ropes which Julianna Joos glues onto cardboard in her collagraphs echo the works of Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee who knots braids of stained jute then hangs them, like lianas, on totemic constructions. ... Australia’s extraordinary virgin forests inspired Joos’ engravings. The curving lines of her engravings entangle one another in the manner of memories, sensations, or ideas, and might also be read as the mapping of a diagram of unconscious thought. Lacan wished to explain the workings of the ‘unconscious’ through such topographical means and used the borromean knot to represent the link between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. (1) And so, towards the end of his life, when he was rendered almost incapable of speech, Lacan transposed his theoretical discourse into a drawing technique intended to explore the sutures of his psyche.

The very titles of Joos’ collagraphs refer as much to topography as to its symbolic function. This topography is certainly evident in her horizontal pieces. In compositions such as Intersection and Orientation, ropes detach themselves from their surfaces, in contrasting tones, evoking the image of sinewed-roots protruding from an ochre-red earth. In another print, the artist uses deep-brown ink suggesting a celebration of the earth reminiscent of Jean Dubuffet’s Texturologies and Materiologies. This symbolic function continues in the vertical series Dénouement, which marks the resolution of a crisis, and in Enlacement, which moves towards the erotic with its curvilinear - sensuality. The transparency of sanguine ink recalls the fragility of skin, under which veins might be perceptible. The arrangement of the jute ropes is analogous to an automatic drawing technique discovered by André Masson — in the summer of 1924, Masson wrote to Michel Leiris with a letter covered in drawings of knots: “The very secret of paintings is held within the knot of a rope”. These shapes appeared as if propelled by some unknown force to make manifest a truth (almost) outside of language itself — a ‘truth’, that the author / artist, when finally reconciled with self, is capable of verbalizing. Experience is coded in the image before it may be transposed into words.

As in her engravings, whether incised in wood or zinc, Joos continues the concept of bonds by shaping supple bows in digital print. Joos was inspired by a 1971 Jean-Paul Riopelle painting representing a string-puzzle to create her Jeux de cordes (String Game) — in essence: four large monochromes presenting yellow as in golden straw; red as in bloodstained skin; green as in aquatic plant-life; and blue as if bordered by the whitish-dusting of fog, or by the chalky-banks alongside a meandering river. The bond’s symbolic potential resides in the ambiguous, granting the observer varied readings of the work. ... As affirmed by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination: “There is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others” (2). ... In the first poem of Calligrammes entitled Links, Apollinaire gave this notion a positive value — “All lovers that one knot has linked”, and, as well, a negative value — “We are but two or three men / Free from all links”. This denouement may either bring about a happy ending — as in a comedy — or result in tragedy, in which the hero must die.

Vanité avec bougie, 2005
Jacquard weaving
44 x 35 cm

From Carpe diem to Memento mori
Joos stages life’s brevity and death’s inevitability in her twelve Vanities. Her Vanities were woven with Jacquard and surrounded by ‘bows’, as if offering up gifts to we mere mortals. The artist was inspired by the Dream of the Knight by eighteenth century Spanish painter, Antonio de Pereda. Dream... depicted a sleeping knight beside whom stood an angel with wings unfurled. On a table, covered with rich fabric, a multitude of symbolic objects were displayed in advisement to the young man that he could not bring such material goods to the grave with him. ... In Classical Antiquity, Ronsard offered counsel to a young woman he wished to seduce (also adapted by Robert Herrick in “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”): “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”. ... Horace’s Carpe diem was a suggestion that we rejoice in all of life’s pleasures, for we will die tomorrow. ... From Christian perspective — in which soul’s salvation is the ultimate goal — these ephemeral joys are vain. Thus, in the Middle Ages, the term “vanity” came to be attributed to works of still-life which displayed both desirable objects for the living and symbolic, premonitions of death.

The skull is almost always present in vanity pieces. Skull imagery appeared — surrounded by knots and bonds — in a 2001 work by Gérad Titus-Carmel entitled Memento mori (Remember That You Will Die). ... Joos has replaced the human skull with the skull of a rat that balances on a noose. The expressionistic quality of her engraving recalls Villon’s realism in The Ballad of the Hanged Men. ... The angel that extinguished the candle in Medieval paintings has been supplanted by the single image of a candle, which, far from vanquished, illuminates the Vanitys with its haloed, yellow flame. the Vanity’s dissipating colours constitute an extraordinary technical success. Rather than depicting roses on the brink of withering, the artist has referenced a wild orchid called ‘Sabot de Marie’ (Mary’s Clog), not unfamiliar to attentive wanderers of the Laurentians. Joos also substituted Horace’s advice “Nunc est bibendum” (“Now we must drink”), with the act of eating refined meals with richly decorated spoons. The terrestrial globe, once signifying the vanity of territorial conquests, has become the blue planet that today’s information-web surrounds entirely. ... Thanks to this global-connecting web, the artist is on the verge of reaching notoriety with regard to a long and faithful practice of her discipline. ... Finally, in the eleventh hour, we must drop the mask with which we have played our role in the theatre of life.
To these vanities, adapted to our era and transformed by the personality of the artist, a highly symbolic bestiary is added. ... The turtle represented as much sagacity as longevity — immortality, or the earth itself. ... Alas, there is neither a handsome knight, nor a Saint-Jerôme to meditate on the human condition — there is only the artist herself. And yet, she has become unrecognizable. The pink-faced child once encircled in knotted bows no longer exists. That little girl has allowed the ‘adult’ Julianna Joos to succeed her.

Robe simultanée (hommage à Sonia Delaunay), 2007
Tailored Jacquard textile
90 x 55 cm
Photo: Denis Charland

Reconnecting With Oneself
Julianna Joos had to first disentangle the threads that twisted within her own psyche before attempting any further connections. In this exhibition, knots strung purposefully in order to surround or hold objects, were made attractive by their very precariousness. The knot — ‘jammed-up’ or ‘restricting’ — remains, according to Lacan, an effect of the “division of the subject”. Once this division is stitch-closed, it is, at last, possible to fabricate reattachments. ... By donning a dress patterned with laces that she wove herself [view: Robe simultanée, 2007] , the artist, at once, suggested a sense of ‘rediscovered unity’ and proposed that her oeuvre might be viewed as a catharsis for those who wish to progress in knowledge of self.

Notes:
(1) Borromean knot: three rings interlaced in such a manner that to break one inevitably separates the other two. It represents, in Lacan’s work:
‘ R’ (the real), ‘S’ (the symbolic), and ‘I’ (the imaginary).
(2) Mikhail Bakhtin “The Dialogic Imagination”. trans: Elzbieta Grodek (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) p.426.