Categories
Portfolio

Maude Arsenault: Resurfacing

BY Jean Dykstra, May 1, 2024

Canadian photographer Maude Arsenault began her career as a fashion photographer, staging shoots, setting up lights, making pictures of beautiful people in beautiful clothes. But her latest body of work, Resurfacing (published by Deadbeat Club, 2023), is all about the flaws. Wrinkles, tears, cracks, scratches, and stains prevail. Hair is tangled, sheets are creased, buildings are in dire need of repair. Life is unruly, messy, and lovely. Arsenault’s previous body of work, Entangled, was in part a reckoning with how her identity as an artist meshed, sometimes uneasily, with her identity as a woman and a mother. Resurfacing explores what it feels like to move through that stage of life into a new world in which familial relationships are changing and her sense of herself is shifting. That shift can feel as earth-shaking and sudden as a building caving in, revealing the beams and supports that are no longer necessary (as in an image of a partially collapsed – or razed – brick building), or as incremental as the crow’s feet and grey hair that weren’t there only a day before (in a close up of Arsenault’s eye, shut tightly). Arsenault’s photographs have a tactile quality that feels rooted in the domestic: the dirty bottoms of young feet; a soft carpet of fallen flower petals; the crinkly plastic of a bag holding a folded quilt – a photograph that recalls the picture of an American flag in a dry-cleaning bag by Mitch Epstein, another chronicler of shifting family relationships. In two images, a woman seems to struggle out of a constricting garment, pulling it up over her head, shedding a skin like a caterpillar poised to become a butterfly.

The photographs are mostly black and white, but the series is punctuated by a few soft color images as well: an explosion of tulle with the barest hint of blue; a green hose coiled below a window stuffed with brown-paper packages; a clothesline casting a zigzag shadow, holding a few plastic clothespins in pink and blue. For all of the landscapes and the dispassionate studies of surfaces, draped fabrics and dried leaves, there are also a few achingly tender pictures of people: Arsenault’s mother sitting in a chair, her legs riddled with varicose veins; two sleeping children, one of whom has flung his arm across the other; a Bandaid on a fingertip; a couple of nude self-portraits, Arsenault’s body partially concealed in both. From picture to picture, Arsenault moves in close and pulls back, which feels apt for the rhythm of the time of life she’s chronicling, leaning in toward her children, then closely regarding herself; watching over them as they sleep, then turning her focus outward. The craggy trunk of an old tree fill the frame of one photograph, the thick bark scarred with deep vertical ruts, the top partly missing. A rickety wooden ladder leans against it, going nowhere. If there was a treehouse there, it’s long gone. Change is inevitable, bittersweet, and full of promise. 

Maude Arsenault, from Resurfacing (Deadbeat Club, 2023)
Maude Arsenault, from Resurfacing (Deadbeat Club, 2023)
Maude Arsenault, from Resurfacing (Deadbeat Club, 2023)
Maude Arsenault, from Resurfacing (Deadbeat Club, 2023)
Maude Arsenault, from Resurfacing (Deadbeat Club, 2023)
Maude Arsenault, from Resurfacing (Deadbeat Club, 2023)
Maude Arsenault, from Resurfacing (Deadbeat Club, 2023)