Another Woman
Marie-Ève Charron —
At the time of writing these lines, an election campaign has been launched in Québec to choose a new government. The traditional and digital media are on high alert and are promising close coverage of the politicians on the ground. For its part, the cityscape has been rapidly decked out with election posters featuring the portrait of their candidates in a style that no longer stands out. Despite this demanding activity, many claim that they feel indifferent, or even cynical about the political class, which they immediately presume to be hypocritical. Kim Waldron could be counted among these people. She admits that she has for a long time thought of politics as consisting of nothing but lies and this is what, among other things, one day drove her to run her own campaign and present herself as an independent candidate in the Papineau riding for the 2015 federal election. Were it not for Waldron’s artist status, as well as her intention to make a work of art with it, this project would probably not have attracted much attention. Instead her experience engendered Public Office (2014–2016), a marathon work synthesizing several issues addressed in her practice that spans over more than 15 years and which this essay proposes to encompass. In the period that led up to her electoral campaign, the artist presented a mini survey exhibition at Galerie Thomas Henry Ross art contemporain that provided the impetus for this publication. A dense grid of photographs displaying selected fragments from Kim Waldron’s series, which disregarded both the frames that previously separated the images and the chronology that organized them up to then. Embracing the same approach, my
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Another Woman
retrospective gaze seeks to focus on the artist’s work without confining it to the notion of self-portraiture to which it could be reduced. In combining photography with performance Kim Waldron sets up an imagery in which the identity of the subject takes shape and, through the stances it adopt and roles it plays, encounters various sites of power presumed to be natural. From one series to the next, she exposes the conditions of her agency in situations that unfold in the fields of work, politics and art, and by developing unconventional representations of women within them. Her art reveals the gender inequalities and asymmetrical power relations that, in order to be effective in the real, are also developed as fantasy projections. In this production, which does not hesitate to merge fact and fiction, the distinction between private and public is put to the test by establishing a relation between personal life and citizen engagement. Waldron’s works thereby once again validate the feminist credo that the “personal is political” and make use of images and performance as heuristic tools that make it possible to go beyond the art world.
The Family Romance In 2015 Kim Waldron published her memoir with the goal of making herself better known among people of the riding she had chosen to campaign in for the federal election. The publication preceded the release of Justin Trudeau’s autobiography, which was announced six months before on the CBC website. For a 42 year-old, son of a renowned prime minister and head of his party, this
