Richard Gagnier (2012)
Translation: Cory McAdam

The State of Jane constitutes a photographic project by Bonnie Baxter. It is built around a single individual, Jane, who through her insertion into a variety of sites and landscapes, makes a statement that is at once biographical, cinematic, and imaginary. Primarily, Jane is a visual composition. As such, her construction becomes an affirmation of the photographic subject and within it, is woven an ensuing critical stance on the female psyche. The project also draws other practices in its wake that have piqued interest in photography and video in recent years; notably auto-fiction and the way in which it differs from the self-portrait. The series wraps itself in the aspect of auto-fiction to better keep its strategies at a critical distance.

The real—and unreal—fall under scrutiny in this project; such is photography today that digital technology can appropriate, manipulate, and evoke pure fiction, despite being modeled on reality. And there may or may not be, reality, supported by “what has been” (the famous “ça a été” of Barthes), as, in this case, the sites featured seem to have been visited or re-visited. The entire focus revolves around a single person, viewed over and over again as in a family photo album and in as many venues. The choice of venues borders on the cliché: Paris, the Tuscan countryside, the American southwest, and Route 66 that leads to it. Thus photography plays this other role: a documentary one, carrying us along to witness what it ultimately produces, what it roots out, how it inevitably reconstructs the site to create an idealized artificiality. Set against the recurring presence of Jane, these larger than life shots tell a story over time, a story now void of drama; any that might have been, is gone, relegated to memory. What emerges is another way to restore the use of photography to oneself, to the self, helping affirm this presence, her presence, a presence merged into the site like some interior landscape.

Who then is this other person, this ‘other’ of the artist whose existence is confirmed, if only by her perambulations around the planet? We may see her as a subject, and given her attributes, a female subject with no intention of disguise. Perhaps persona is a better interpretation, a highly autonomous creature, an offshoot of the artist’s thoughts, but one with, and shaped by, her own disposition. She acts, she reflects, and she expresses, as is borne out in the aesthetic position reinforced by the series. She seems to reveal a certain destiny, itself a re-affirmation of the subject, yet she determinedly resists being drawn into the narration. This resistance is no doubt due to the fact that each image seems suspended in time, further energizing the series. And that suspension gradually gives way to contemplation, notably of the landscape. There is also the sense of a retrospective gaze in that suspension of time (Jane is from a certain age), yet this gaze is never revealed to us. The blond coiffure—the wig—has lost the platinum blond flamboyance of one’s prime, and the clothing and poses suggest none of the illustrative imperatives dictated by the code of fashion. In fact, what we see is our subject facing an urge to spurn the photographic corps, who have long toyed with female seduction and its many facets, leading to its objectification through domination of the eye of the viewer. The eye here is that of the subject herself, surveying the scene and inviting us to survey it as well. It is hardly surprising that her back is to us at all times, that she is so often in the foreground, yet virtually excluded from the field of the photograph itself. The wig becomes our constant, our index.

And she has a name: Jane, an educational icon, synonymous with the “Dick and Jane” books that were used to teach generations of North American schoolchildren to read. But which, in the process, brashly imposed cultural and social values: those of a white, comfortable middle class with pre-defined behaviors and expectations, the class that epitomized the American way of life after World War II, the class of would-be universal contentment. Our Jane is from this world, but she has escaped it. She has sought out her own life experiences. She has individualized herself. She has put time (inseparable from photography, which snatches it up and discards it somewhere) between the memory, the broken fragments of fiction, the moments of reflection, and the affirmation of a state of being, which the landscape returns to her, in contemplation.

Jane is about all of this, and by inference, she, is about Bonnie Baxter.