Artist Carole Latulipe, originally from Saint-Anicet, trained in fine arts and graphic design. Her practice includes printmaking, drawing, and photography, and she presently works as a visual arts technician at CÉGEP de Valleyfield.
Her most recent exhibition, La Fille du facteur, currently on view at Salle Alfred-Langevin, is a visual exploration of her childhood memories of helping her father deliver mail along the Saint-Anicet-Cazaville/Port-Lewis route he ran from the 1960s to the 1980s.
La Fille du facteur grew from a 2012 three-panel serigraph series depicting her father — once with a mailbox, once with a spider, once with a bird, all images she associated with him and the route. She has carried this symbolic imagery into the thirty-seven new works that make up the exhibition.
Latulipe’s work is fun to look at: many pieces are brightly coloured and imaginatively presented, with a simple graphic sensibility that reflects her design background. Combined with several small sensitive linear works, they give the exhibition a pleasant visual rhythm.
For this exhibition, Latulipe uses several printmaking techniques: inkjet printing, serigraphy or screen printing, dry point-printing, and collagraphy. Many works are printed or pasted onto used envelopes, as in Araignées enveloppes. Unframed paper and even pieces printed on repurposed metal – Oiseau métal and Araignées metal – suggest vulnerability over time. Only the small dry-point engravings and collagraphs of people and post offices are framed.
Painterly serigraphic images of shaggy black birds and refined spiders, both frequent occupants of rural mailboxes, recur throughout. On one wall, eight round wooden panels painted bright orange collaged with birds, spiders, and sections of a recognizable local newspaper hang in two rows: Wednesday was “Gleaner delivery day,” and the orange circular marker once identified private vehicles used for rural mail delivery (Oiseaux Gleaner and Araignées Gleaner).
The largest work, La Femme des concours is a multi-panel dry-point print of a woman known to Latulipe for entering many mail-in contests and whose flouncing underdressed figure at the mailbox left a lasting impression on the young artist. The image looks bold and unrestrained, like a loose gestural drawing, but its flowing “lines” are built from countless tiny marks of controlled cross-hatching — the result of painstakingly engraving twenty separate plates of rigid plastic.
The mailboxes of the route appear in a series of inkjet prints, Les Boîtes à malle 1–4. Cut cleanly from their backgrounds and grouped in neat rows, their heightened blues, reds, and blue-blacks stand out against the yellow envelopes on which they’re mounted, giving these pieces a crisp, hard-edged quality that contrasts with the gestural birds, spiders, and figures elsewhere.
According to the artist, these recurring images — birds, mailboxes, spiders, characters, post offices — speak not only of her father but to the repetitive nature of the route itself. Repetition is also fundamental to printmaking, which could in turn be seen as analogous to memory. Just as the mind stores an experience which is not the experience itself but a memory of it, a printing plate, stencilled screen, or digital file is not the artwork itself but a means of storing the information that generated it.
The exhibition text describes Latulipe’s work as a place where “real memories and fictional narratives converge.” Although this exhibition is rooted in childhood experiences, the unreliability of memory isn’t limited to childhood. Many neuroscientists argue the brain reconstructs memories each time they’re recalled, leaving them vulnerable to change. Rather than playing back an exact “recording” of an experience, the act of remembering is filtered through our current emotions or beliefs, potentially changing what we remember. Latulipe’s work suggests something similar, in both its subject and its method: Deliberate choices by the artist, accidental variations in pressure, ink, paper, or even wear on the plate or the printer mean that no two prints are ever completely the same. Every impression is a slightly new version.
Latulipe admits that her childhood memories are distorted. In La Fille du facteur, those memories may have undergone multiple transformations: first by recollection, and then through the act of making art.
La Fille du facteur continues at Salle Culturelle Alfred-Langevin, at 10 King Street, Huntingdon, until August 30.