BONNIE BAXTER

MARCH 19 – APRIL 30, 2016

La mort tragique et prématurée de Jane

DIVISION GALLERY Montreal, 2020 rue William, www.galeriedivision.com



"The Tragic and Premature Death of Jane" is about the inescapable fiction of ourselves as we are endlessly replicated in the stories of others. The fascination in popular fiction with impostors, twins, and doppelgängers is tied to our conflicting desire to be known, and our fears of having people find out who we really are, something infinitely magnified by today's self produced and self-reproducing media.

Jane is a character I created in 2006, an archetype to play the role of every-Jane in my 2008 series "Jane's Journey." I took her on the road. We went to Europe, drove across the United States. She came home with me. When I went to China she came along, I thought I'd lost her there, but she showed up again. By 2010 I had been with her for such a long time I began to feel like she was running my life and not the other way around, so I decided she had to go. Luckily I had some help.

There's no better friend than the one who will help you get away with murder. I eliminated Jane in 2011. Her death was announced in a faux-newspaper article written by Christine Unger who also agreed to write the story of her death "My Name is Jane." I created a large, dramatic work with what appears to be Jane's corpse of in an extravagantly moonlit excavation site. We opened a virtual case file an then we both got busy with other things. Still, Jane was there, in the background, a persistent, niggling itch. She was the kind of character to go out with a bang and she hadn't had hers yet. Five years later I offer you "The Tragic and Premature Death of Jane" currently on view at Division Gallery.

What's it all about, Jane is Dead, isn't she? It turns out that the body at the site isn't hers after all. Jane is gone, yes, but only because she's taken on a new identity. You see, I can't really kill her off. Too much of her is me and I am far from finished. Where the earlier series were about Jane as an externalized manifestation of self-discovery. Jane mort is the insidious infection of the duplicate, the way an image of self can become the controlling aspect of self. They say everyone has a doppelgänger. I say why worry about that when we are projecting ourselves into the world with such frequency and rapidity that we're awash in a flood of our own re-created selves, represented in environments read by others as dramas, fictions of life rather than life itself.

below is a synopsis of the pulp-fiction style story of Jane's murder case (the complete story can be read on my site via this link >