Nadia Belerique

The habitual behaviours and environmental factors of the bedroom are referred to by many as sleep hygiene. A regular and consistent schedule, no working or eating from bed, no phone, computer or tablet screens in the bedroom, no daytime napping, less alcohol and caffeine at night-time, absolutely no snooze button—improving one’s sleep hygiene is a common strategy for alleviating insomnia, for training oneself to sleep better. The very phrase “sleep hygiene” implies a night-time rest that is deep and pure, not one muddled by invasive thoughts, scattered dreams or reckless habits. It’s a sleep scrubbed fresh and clean.

There are three large, waterjet- cut steel frames throughout Nadia Belerique’s exhibition, “Bed Island,” at Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto, each a hollow rectangle built of an uninterrupted, worried line. Read against the two freestanding steel sculptures spread on the floor, there’s the makings of a bedroom dispersed throughout the gallery: it forms a bed frame and sheets. The crisp gallery white of Daniel Faria’s walls becomes the white expanse of a mattress, and given the wrinkled edges of these steel frames, it’s one mussed and stained with night-time tossing and turning (and sweating). Some of the frames have items of clothing knotted to their sides—a faded denim jacket, a black sweater—in the manner that you might casually cast aside a pair of pants while dressing for work, or find a t-shirt wadded in a fitted mattress sheet straight from the dryer.

In a recent interview in Canadian Art Online with Amy Fung, Belerique indicated that “Bed Island” was about making art from her own bed. There’s a long and celebrated history of artists making work from and/or about the places where they sleep (Henri Matisse’s designs for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence on the French Riviera, Frida Kahlo’s self portraits, Tracey Emin, John and Yoko) yet these points of reference seem to fall short in contextualizing the exhibition’s layered and disorienting approach to image-making. There are collaged photographs hung throughout the gallery: some placed within the large steel frames, some in pairs, hung on plywood inside clean rectangles cut through the gallery’s drywall. Like the messy expanse of a mattress formed from the (otherwise clean) wall space in the centre of a steel frame, these images also create destabilizing forms of depth across milky smooth surfaces. A collaged spoon and fork, the blurry outline of the bottom of a shoe, a loose coil of film, the base of a glass bottle: everyday items turned fractured, shapeless or out of focus. These works are also collaged with creased and torn scraps of images scanned imperfectly so their edges fade into blankness, and scans of broken panes of glass.

As articulated by Rosemary Heather in the exhibition text for “Bed Island,” Belerique created these hazy still lifes by lying prone with her camera, shooting upward through a frosted pane of glass. In the aforementioned interview, Fung mentions a project by Belerique for the upcoming Biennale de Montreal, “Le Grand Balcony,” where she reverses this process, capturing images from a downwards-facing flatbed scanner suspended eight feet high. The exhibition’s uncanny horizontal/ vertical shift feels rooted in these reconfigured directions of imagemaking. Here, Belerique’s work seems less the work of a vertically oriented photographer looking outward at the world through a lens, but rather, a horizontally prone body on a mattress, staring upwards at the ceiling. The picture plane tilts and shifts—looking up, looking down—and “Bed Island” remains suspended in a strange position between conflicting horizontal and vertical axes.

If sleep hygiene is the crisp, clean white of a tucked-in bed sheet, a smooth white of deep sleeps and rested mornings, the white’s of “Bed Island” are not so pure. It’s the realm of gallery white carved through to exposed plywood, the used and stained white of an old mattress littered with books and bottles, the empty white of a flatbed scanner picking up dead air, the cold white of a laptop screen in the early insomniac hours of the morning, which brings us back to that historic list of artists working from bed—in my mind, what sets “Bed Island” apart from these mythologized stories is that for Belerique, one’s bed is not a state that must be transcended in order for creative work to take place. Instead, “Bed Island” finds generative space in the intimate, imperfect and mundane psychological textures of the bedroom. It is work seemingly produced from that familiar opaque feeling, dozing while reading the same paragraph over and over in bed, words and images unhinging from their meanings as you fade in and out, between your sheets. ❚

“Bed Island” was exhibited at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, from April 21 to June 4, 2016.

Daniella Sanader is a writer and researcher living in Toronto.