In Montreal, we know of the famous portraits from Pascal Grandmaison’s series Verre (2004–2005), one of which adorned the façade of a bistro on a street corner: a large portrait of a young woman, expressionless, holding a sheet of plate glass in front of her. Although in her high position on the wall over the street she appeared to be looking over us pedestrians, in a gallery space, where images are at our height, all the subjects of the different portraits look down. Their gazes are absent, therefore abolishing subjectivity: the glass even becomes ironic as it poses both as a mirror and a transparency of an absent subject. What was striking, when I first encountered Grandmaison’s works in the early to mid-2000s in Montreal, was this evacuation of the subject, this a-subjectivity, this vacuity. One author has talked of the reification of the subject in Grandmaison’s work, reminding us that reification is the process by which a living being is metamorphosed into a thing.

The question of subjectivity is here played out through a series of deconstructions of the traditional or conventional codes of photography, film and video. A more recent work entitled The Neutrality Escape (2008) is an eleven-minute loop shot in high definition black-and-white video that has for subject matter extreme close-ups of cinematographic apparatus, including an old Angénieux camera and a film projector. The mechanical Angénieux, although sophisticated and well designed, when shot in black and white connotes a world gone by, another era of image-making. These extreme close-ups are not concerned with the cinematographic apparatus as it constitutes the subject of reception, but with the body of the apparatus, fragmenting it and reconstructing it in the form of a composite of images of the fleeting passage of light and the sounds of the film strip passing through the gate. This recent work exemplifies Grandmaison’s approach, which is to refer us back to the condition of the image.

Grandmaison’s cleverness is also that of someone arriving after a long and important tradition of film and video by artists in Canada, beginning with Michael Snow’s films and film installations, followed by the more recent examples of Stan Douglas, Mark Lewis, Rodney Graham or Janet Cardiff, to name only the better known. Grandmaison’s work is concerned by ephemerality, emptiness, a-subjectivity and nostalgia. One might say that contrary to certain of his Canadian colleagues, he is of this generation of Québécois who have started to wonder about the conditions of identity in our world of ever circulating images. The nostalgia that is felt at times in front of certain of his work may be that of an unresolved identity.