May 10–August 30, 2025
Jot Fau’s la fin d’une lignée (the end of a lineage, all works 2025) is as intricately produced as custom-made bikers’ gloves. Three pairs of curved jaw pliers, suspended inside an alcove at this art space on the grounds of an active psychiatric hospital, have been meticulously stitched into a leather skin that is tight enough to reveal each object’s function, but also signals its removal from ordinary circulation.
The three devices descend in size, each sheltering its smaller companion between its grip handles until we reach the bottom of the trinity. The pliers are linked with a cord that Fau has also sewn in leather and then strapped like a harness to the inner thighs of each device. The effect is sexy in the way extremely competent people are sexy.
Installed in a rectangular recess, one of several spaced regularly along the curved wall of a closed women’s ward built in the 1930s, the work shares space with a large metal handle. It operates a ventilation shaft to a locked cell behind the wall. When the shaft is closed there is no opening to the room, meaning no airflow and no sound. In the 1990s the cells were converted to functions appropriate to an arts center—bathrooms, black boxes for video work, small chambers for the presentation of more intimate pieces—but until 1982 they were used as isolation quarters for women with severe mental illnesses.
In another alcove a pair of flashlights dangle, also cocooned inside a handmade leather sheath (un regard éclairé, or illuminated gaze). In a third, ici, c’est chez toi (here, you are home) a small trinket in the shape of a house frame is studded with rhinestones and suspended on a metal chain. It glitters softly in the hallway’s half-light like a promise fulfilled: when these objects break free of their confinement they will emerge transformed. Did the women who once lived at 3 bis f also transform? Fau’s work begs the question of where the line is between refuge and confinement, between a solitary metamorphosis fueled by an individual’s desire and a personality slowly atrophying as a result of isolation.
S’écarter—from the exhibition title, “S’écarter du texte”—means to distance oneself from something or someone, but also to make oneself deviate from a given path. The word signals deliberate movement: a hand pushing a stack of papers off a table or tossing a book out of the sunroof of a car between gear changes on a two-lane coastal highway, precise and reckless at once. Though the works Fau exhibits speak to the metamorphosis that might come from protected seclusion—inside a tight leather skin, at a distance from daily use—the title implies a rejection of that which is known because it is written.
Whatever transformation the pliers in the handle box are in the process of undergoing, reading Lacan is not part of it. But then again one can stray from the text without rejecting it outright. For portal, Fau has sewn an elaborate padding over the door to one of the cells in old, yellowing hospital blankets, including a soft layer over the door handle with meticulous stitchwork to create volume. I see the artist standing in a cell’s doorway for hours with a needle and thread with yards of brittle wool blankets washed hundreds of times to dispel the anguish to which they have borne witness.
i must not fear, fear is the mindkiller is titled after the Bene Gesserit litany against fear in Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction classic Dune, which is recited to help distinguish between existential threat and the illusion of threat and to stay lucid in moments of crisis. The person who can master their fear can make choices; they can direct the transformation of their own consciousness. Fau’s work by this name is, in comparison, anti-heroic. A life vest enveloped by soft grey wool supports the weight of two swords. One sword is sewn into a 1970s patterned velour fabric; the other is a bare wooden practice sword decorated with bits wrapped in leather and polyester. The wall sculpture could not save a drowning child, would not frighten anymore, and could not wound an assailant. It is, like the other works in the exhibition, an amalgamation of objects supporting each other in stasis, waiting for the shattered yet interdependent universes they represent to slowly knit themselves back together.
Fau’s insistence on the time and labor that transformative repair represents responds with subtlety to 3 bis f’s remarkable mandate as a fluid, open space for patients, staff, and the public alike to encounter contemporary art and performance inside Montperrin Psychiatric Hospital Center. 3 bis f hosts artists and performers for several months and all the exhibited work is made onsite in the studio that was an open women’s dormitory for ten. This injunction is part of the art space’s founding logic to risk unscripted, non-exclusionary encounters between the hospital community and artists without psychiatric training. It is a forty-year experiment in the nonmetaphorical realization of the conditions required for structural change. I leave it and Fau’s carefully cocooned things in the thick afternoon heat wishing this belief in durationality in the conjunction between aesthetics and psychic damage were generalized.
