February 8 – March 15, 2025
Inspired by the discovery of more than 500 nitrate film reels found buried on the site of a defunct cinema in an old gymnasium (the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association) in the Canadian town of Dawson city Jugnet Clairet created a series of paintings after Bill Morrisons documentary Dawson City : Frozen Time, 2016.
Bill Morrison's film “Dawson City: Frozen Time” (2016) traces the history of nitrate films (flammable films), from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century, in relation to the Canadian city of Dawson located on the Alaskan border. During the gold rush, Dawson must have been a very popular city. It also corresponded to the end of the distribution chain for newsreels produced by Hollywood.
From 1911, the city gymnasium (D.A.A.A.) became a busy movie theater, whose old swimming pool was later to serve as a storage place for nitrate films. The film reels will end up buried in the rubble of the building which will burn in 1937, and will be rediscovered at the end of the 1970s during the construction of a new building on the site of the former D.A.A.A. More than 500 films were to be found, damaged over time by humidity, significant alterations invading the image.
We have chosen a sequence from a 1919 newsreel reporting an explosion caused by a letter bomb sent by anarchists. Explosion reminiscent of the fires caused by nitrate films at the same time. Referring to these altered images, we executed a series of grayscale paintings, titled D.A.A.A.
We sought to restore the history of these images with regard to that of their materiality, confronting two systems of representation - one by a succession of glazes (white glazes gradually erasing a previously brushed explosion background image), the other by means of stencils (adhesives in vinyl, an adhesive by value of gray drawing precisely the contours of the alterations), thus seeking to create a significant relief, even a hollow, in the pictorial layer.
