[Fall 2026]

Traces of Affect
By Charlotte Lalou Rousseau

[EXCERPT]

Judith Bellavance collects collections. Vases, hangers, words, cut flowers, fragments of dead insects, and more. Photography, she says, lets her reduce the physical space that these accumulations occupy. It’s a gesture that may anticipate the imperative of loss, a response to the ineluctable disappearances that punctuate our lives. Indeed, loss and disappearance have been recurrent themes in Bellavance’s work for fifteen years. We might be tempted to attach the term “documentary” to her photographic practice, but we quickly realize that her images are more about creating narrative. She observes attentively, selects meticulously, stages carefully, juxtaposes elegantly, and retouches subtly to create fictions that she conceives of as “scripts of loss.” This strategy is notable in her video installation Pierres blanches (2023), her book Choisir (2021), and her series Un corps pour Hope (2018).

At DÈS_, an art centre run by thirteen photographers that opened in the Belgo Building in Montreal in 2026, Bellavance presented her entire photographic series Histoires de disparitions (2023) for the first time. Eighteen life-size images printed on linen were installed in pairs, back to back, for a total of nine objects hanging in the space. The grey-tinted photographs floating in the middle of the gallery gave a sense of nostalgia, even though they were bathed in illumination. The lighting amplified this ghostly effect by casting no shadows on the walls. The photographs depicted clothing and almost iridescently coloured garment bags, all arranged on hangers. The unusual display mechanism invited visitors to move among the images, creating a destabilizing, almost facial proximity to them. But their subject was a bit chilling: these clothes were the last worn by the people to whom they had belonged. A thanatologist since 2019, Bellavance had embalmed the deceased owners of these garments and then dressed them for their wake, to be followed by their burial or cremation.

[…]

 

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 133 – INTIMACIES ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here : Traces of Affect ]

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Having started as a painter, Judith Bellavance then turned to photography. She retains her interest in details and in the materiality of objects, the mnemonic force of which she seeks to capture. She has had numerous solo exhibitions since the 1980s and has attended creative residencies in Quebec and France. Her works are in museum and corporate collections. Since completing studies in thanatology in 2019, she has also been working as an embalmer. judithbellavance.com

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Charlotte Lalou Rousseau is interested in the connection between background and form. An associate curator of contemporary art at the Musée d’art de Joliette from 2017 to 2022, she currently works as a curator, critic, and translator. She has organized ten exhibitions in Quebec and elsewhere and has published articles in Le Sabord, Ciel variable, Esse, and Spirale.