Ingrid Tremblay | Salty Feel

“The collusion of body and memory and the slippage between visual and physical sensation are at the heart of Tremblay’s work. In her soft sculpture Drop, Tremblay has played materially with the experience of spatial memory by weaving together photographs of different landscapes printed on fabric. As one moves in relation to the work, the landscapes vacillate between merge and disintegration, mimicking both the effects of mirage and those of memory. This moment of conceptual innovation subtly suggests the way events and feelings from our past blend together almost imperceptibly, permeating our sense of place.

For Tremblay, humans and objects press up against each other leaving imprints, like fingers in moist dough. The mutually affective interactions between humans and the material world are intimate, illogical, suffused with eros. In another sculpture, Salty Feel, Tremblay has mixed up a batch of homemade play-dough to construct a small-scale replica of Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. Its title makes reference to the strange coincidence of multiple levels of sensory perception with personal memory.

As a child, the delicious pink color of her mother’s homemade play-dough flooded Tremblay with the conviction that she must taste it. The salty shock of its actual taste taught her the painful disappointment of synesthesia. Recreating this material as an adult, the artist sought to know through touch, repairing her ability to see the mountain from only one-side when she lived in view of it, in the small town of Chagnon, France. Both playful and bittersweet, Salty Feel’s inevitable failure to convey the mountain’s massive reality is part of its power. As the artist puts it, Salty Feel attempts to access a reality that is both “greater and more intricate that what we may perceive.”

– Jessi DiTillio