A doctor’s visit that seems not to have gone so well can be observed in Jenny LeBlanc’s installation. The work, though, may be less of an installation and rather the physical trace of a documented event or process that occurred previously. A typical doctor’s office, with its institutional blue walls topped with floral wallpaper, clock, steel trashcan, waiting chair, biology posters, coat rack, and exam table, are all enclosed by a transparent wall and presented with a black relief print and a video. The print shows the lungs upside down, birds are perched on branches of veins. Inside the office, a print remains on the torn end of the exam table paper while crumpled prints overflow from the biohazard-labeled trashcan. Little green feathers litter the floor. A pair of skin-colored spandex shorts bearing the relief cut used to print the image hangs on the coat rack. The video presented is a looped documentation of what occurred in the space. A woman goes to a doctor’s office. She waits and waits. Dressed in a hospital gown, when the doctor arrives, she stands up exposing her rear end, the relief. The image prints as she sits on the table. She follows the doctor’s instructions, including the final one: “Hold your breath.” Doing this, for as long as she can, she coughs up green feathers, when her body calls for air. The video narrates the making of the print while the print explains the occurrences within the video. Hold Your Breath is a cyclical narration of an experience of a place, a time, and its byproduct. Unless this is realism at its most magical, we should perhaps assume that the narrative is at the level of metaphor.
Jenny LeBlanc’s work combines the printmaking process and performance. She creates sculptural objects that can be used in a performance of printmaking, a repetitious act, allowing her to document her experiences with mark making. LeBlanc says, “…all action resulting from all beings leaves some kind of mark, trace, or residue in its wake. The residue in turn gives clues about what has taken place.” “Hold Your Breath” not only addresses this personal residue left by the artist as an individual but also the larger residue embodied by New Orleans post-Katrina. The green feathers are remnants of the same parrots found in her earlier work “M and Q.” Her interest in them intensified as the parrots that once flocked her neighborhood continue to fail to return. She wonders, “Do they know something we don’t? Do they know better than to come around because of the mold and contamination? Ultimately, the parrots emblemize for me a healthy and vibrant, intact New Orleans.” As healthcare becomes a less and less accessible luxury for most Americans in our ever-wealthy country, LeBlanc scrutinizes a wider healing process in New Orleans. She recognizes that healing has yet to reach completion and that this recovery is a very necessary process no matter the price, even if it means taking a few years off of her life, staying in New Orleans and contributing to it’s rebirth is important to her, and to her community.
Tuyen Nguyen.