NO SHOW

1996

Dimensions variable
Latex sheeting, hardware, lights, duratrans photographs, plexiglass domes, chains, fish hooks, heating/cooling duct fittings.

No Show are multi-media wall sculptures incorporating the body as sculpture, documentation and performance. Kirouac encased and photographed herself pushing and pressing outward under large sheets of latex affixed to her studio wall. Kirouac then printed these images as 4” x 5” duratrans photographs and created ‘wombs’ for them using heating duct pipes, chains, old fishing hooks, plastic domes and latex skins. Revelations of the female nude are simultaneously suggested and denied by the amorphous, flame-like figures trapped inside skin-like cocoons. In the ensuing struggle backward and forward, sensuality lingers at the threshold of escape/ emergence.

A few months after the premiere of this exhibition at Ace Art Gallery in Winnipeg (my first solo exhibition) in 1996, Kirouac met her biological mother for the first time at the age of twenty-six… she told Kirouac that when her birth due date came and went, she began to refer to her unborn daughter as a no show.