It is at the crossroads of personal history and collective memory that Myriam Jacob-Allard’s work lingers. These take form in the exhibition around two narratives: a popular song and a family story. The title of the exhibition, T’envoler, is borrowed from a country song, a musical genre with a particular resonance for the artist’s family. Country music, at times described as “white people’s blues”, has the same visceral quality, that impulse to be close, in simple terms, to everyday life and feelings. Moreover, the lovelorn refrain in one of the principal works of the exhibition is sung by Jacob-Allard, her mother and her sister. The artist places beside this song a story which, because of its persistance, is part of the family lore. This story, told countless times by her grandmother, is an implausible tale of the time a hurricane worthy of The Wizard of Oz, when she was a child, picked her up and sent her flying. Present in each of these stories, the idea of flying away – or of sending someone flying (t’envoler) – invests Jacob-Allard’s piece with a strange duality: at once murky and light-hearted, the sign of freedom and attachment, of belonging and flight, it is the duality of fear of the unknown and the reassuring familiar. Under the surface, a private story’s potential for universality can be seen taking shape, but also, as a sign of the times at this moment of great uniformity, the deep desire to reconnect with – or even to invent – a unique story all one’s own.

Images so that we may hear; sounds so that we may see. A willingness to refine our understanding of the world, to extract from the unique relationship of sound and image a meaning that transcends our initial perception of the whole. As though the incompleteness brought forth by the absence, censorship or obliteration of one sense contributes to the making of sense. As though the essence of the matter resides in unfulfilled expectations, or in the avowed lacunae of several of the artworks brought together here.

Watch, listen more closely to catalyze a sharper form of consciousness and an enduring acuity that permit an ever-clearer reading of things and of this world, which, for the first time in history, is called upon to face its precariousness through an incessantly mediated reality.