Artistic Statement
"This exhibition, entitled une coquille, une cruche, une feuille, is the fruit of years of investigation into the life-world of a secret society of queer and trans people raided by the police in Los Angeles in the 1910s. Behind a greenhouse near the port, on the first floor of a small building, a ribald group of denizens practiced drag in secret around what they called a "queer altar".
After a century of obscurity, in 2021, I uncovered the existence of something that left me speechless and sent me on one of the most meaningful adventures of my life: on the second floor of the building that was raided was one of the most significant seashell collections in Californian history. The queens had been conducting séances, composing four-part harmonic ballads to the sea, procuring the newly available syphilis treatment, and contributing to the ongoing taxonomical project of Western biology, providing data for scientists around the world who went on to describe and name sea snail species then unknown to Western science, and embarking on trips up and down the Pacific Coast. Twenty-two mollusks are still named for the queens.
Queer spirits speak in meaningful chances: in Jung's synchronicity. When I say I was not expecting to find a secret museum of marine biology above the sex club, please trust me. That good old-fashioned synchronicity would lead me and my ribald group of psychic private investigators to the mortuary niche that contains the ashes of the owner of the club in the haunted glory of the Inglewood Mausoleum, to a strange series of cement slabs covered in graffiti on cliffs above the Pacific Ocean by the enormous container port of Los Angeles, and to a mansion in Los Angeles full of phonographs where the cackling queens' voices were played from the wax cylinder from 1914. Then I found the queens' shell collection itself. To my astonishment, the museum curators who cared for them invited us to sing the harmonic songs in the mollusk storeroom among the drawers.
When I uncovered, after a year and a half of enspirited research, three images of the interior of The 606 Club, I was enraptured by the sheer multiplicity of the objects stored in drawers and on display to those who knew where to find them. From a phenomenological perspective, the building and the drawers became powerful anchors of theory. My studio became an elaborate altar of things my collaborators and I acquired in the work of digging and gifts from the people who had pieces of the puzzle. One thing after another.
Une coquille, une cruche, une feuille points to a new way of working with objects and history for me, just like the club itself defied established typology. In conversation with the work of Elizabeth Freeman, whose scholarship on the Queer Victorian Era in North America, Beside You in Time (Duke, 2019) deeply influenced my method in this project, I began to wonder how researchers and artists could strive for non-hierarchical and deeply embodied adjacency with the people whose worlds we were peering into. She insisted that rhythm and time were "texts" that could accomplish this. I began to place objects and musical notations from diaries, and recipes gathered in the course of the research beside one another. I bound them together, and I wrapped them in fresh protective archival paper.
In 1914, following the police raid of the club, the queens turned to the water for relief. For John, the sea promised respite as a place to end his life; Herbert found peace by turning to seashells and science and continued a lifetime of correspondence with the leading scientists of the day. And so in due course, the paper holding the photographs and objects needed to touch the water-something that would ruin its contents, a spoiling that activates a lineage of a very different paradigm than that archival preservation. A lineage like ours is antediluvian, a chain that can actively be un-broken, if there's even one young queen curious enough to wet the dried yeast on the bottom of the jug that was almost lost forever, to take that jug to the edge of the water, and to teach their friends the songs." - Jamie Ross
Listen to the audio guide by Jamie Ross on the exhibition on the gallery's soundcloud channel:
https://soundcloud.com/galeriepfoac/guide-audio-an-jan-9
Bio
Jamie Ross (1987, Canada) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Archival whistles, blown glass jugs of saliva-fermented fruit juice, deathmasks, seashell collections, found photographs, unsubstantiated rumours, wax cylinder recordings of the voice, and layers of transparent mulberry paper are abiding elements of Jamie's multi-disciplinary practice. Through sculpture, collage, the moving image, and the written word, Jamie looks at cultures, codes and comportments that emerge from of queer hiding. With an academic background in Linguistics (BA, McGill, 2010), language, speech and song are aspects that often define the artist's projects.
Ross' work has recently been shown at Noon Projects (Los Angeles), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles), Olga Korper Gallery (Toronto), MOMENTA Biennale (Montreal) and The Plumb (Toronto). He has conducted residencies at The Banff Centre (Alberta, Canada), El Museo de Arte Moderno (Castro, Chile), La Usurpadora (Barranquilla, Colombia), El Museo de Arte de Morelia (Mexico), at Lugar a Dudas (Cali, Colombia), c.off (Stockholm, Sweden), Corazón (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and Union Docs (New York). Ross' writing on contemporary art has appeared in PUBLIC,La Presse, Revista Errata, C Magazine, and Canadian Art. Ross is the recipient of multiple awards and prizes, including Best Short Film at Hot Docs (Toronto), Best International Short at Doc L.A. Jamie was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to spend three years developing a project touching the lifeworld of a Late Victorian queer and trans secret society raided by the Los Angeles police in 1914. Ross holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art (UCLA, 2023). They are based in Los Angeles and Montreal.
_________________________
Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Montreal and Los Angeles-based visual artist and filmmaker Jamie Ross. Entitled Jamie Ross : une coquille, une cruche, une feuille, this exhibition is the fruit of years of micro-historical investigation into the life-world of a secret society of queer and trans socializing in Los Angeles in the 1910s. At an underground club, a ribald group of denizens practiced drag in secret, and the site also contained, paradoxically, one of the most significant seashell collections in Californian history. Playing on the productive tension between wet and dry and the rich psychic potential of invisibility, Ross interrogates the practices and politics of preservation in his investigation (of which only three images of the interior of the club remain), as well as the propagation of yeast-critical in the home fermentation of fruit alcohol and herbal remedies. Alongside photographic collages made with resin poured through mulberry paper, Ross presents a fantastical and functional glass sculpture for brewing and a new film starring artists Ron Athey and Yunuen Rhi channeling their forebears.