“ … my work is always about seeing myself as being a woman in the world.”

HEAR ME CRY was exhibited at the Niagara Artists Centre (NAC) in 2021 from June 20 to September 18. What follows is the transcript of an interview between Linda Steer, Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture at Brock University, and the artist, Gabrielle de Montmollin, which took place at the artist’s studio in October 2021.

STEER: Let’s talk about Hear Me Cry.

MONTMOLLIN: Sure.

STEER: It gave me a lot to think about in terms of photography and the history of photomontage and feminism–

MONTMOLLIN: Right.

STEER: In your artist statement for Hear Me Cry you talk about the foreground and the background in this work, and how there’s always something going on in the background that we might not be aware of while we’re focused on the foreground – that it’s important to think about the background. I thought that was interesting. You’ve taken a unique approach to photomontage. To me, it looks a lot like a diorama that you have photographed —

MONTMOLLIN: Yes.

STEER: And then, there are still life images situated within a physical space. It’s not as flat as a lot of photomontage would be historically; it’s almost a space you can imagine yourself entering into. So I’m wondering if you could maybe tell me a bit about the process of making these interesting images?

MONTMOLLIN: But what do you mean by photomontage? How do you define it?

STEER: I’m thinking about the iconic avant-garde work from the twenties and thirties like dada and surrealist photomontage, where photographic images are cut up and then placed on something flat and rephotographed.

MONTMOLLIN: Right. That’s how I think about it too. But my photos aren’t like that at all. I mean, when you say, dioramas, I guess that’s closer because I actually did them on this table (points to table in studio). It’s one shot. I had the background against that board. And then the still life in front and the camera here. So there’s no cutting out. I mean, I cut out the background images and put them together, but then they existed that way in the photograph. Right? It’s kind of, I don’t know, sometimes it’s hard to explain. But what you see is just one photograph. It’s not put together.

STEER: So it’s a real 3-dimensional space that you created. You photographed the setup that you’ve made here.

MONTMOLLIN: Yes. Which is what I’ve always done. The earlier photographs I did with toys and dolls were always like that as well. And I don’t use Photoshop except to clean them up a little bit but hardly at all. It’s all done in front of the camera.

STEER: So it’s almost a kind of sculpture?

MONTMOLLIN: Or an installation.

STEER: I think the other connection I saw with photomontage, even if your process is different, is that idea of bringing disparate ideas or images together, such as in the surrealist technique of juxtaposition, and then shocking the viewer with that juxtaposition, which is kind of what that series is all about, really. Do you want to talk a bit about juxtaposition?

MONTMOLLIN: The series I did before this one, which is called Dreams, Delusions, and Other Traffic Circles, the title certainly was intended to be surrealistic. I shot them on this table in my studio, I put wallpaper on the back and I would do these little setups against the wallpaper. The wallpaper was actually wrapping paper and it was very colorful and very distracting. And then there were scenes going on of little people or little animals, or whatever, which were quite narrative. So again, there was a real disconnect between the background and the scene. Those ones I did relatively quickly and sometimes, I would set them up and I’d shoot them and they wouldn’t be any good. That’s the thing with digital. You can look at it and say, “no, that doesn’t work.” And either I’d leave it or I’d change it but I’d easily do one a day or one over two or three days.

But I’d always had this idea that I wanted to do these political still lifes, that’s how I thought of them, which is what Hear Me Cry ended up being. And when I started those, they were different in the sense that the backgrounds were really hard to do. Sometimes it took me a month — I mean, I wasn’t working on them every day– or even two months of just thinking about it and trying to make it work. It took me much longer than it’s ever taken me before for each photograph. The intention is that the still life has no relation to the background. Well, except, maybe in one or two of them–.

STEER: I can see a relationship in a couple of them.

MONTMOLLIN: Yes. The one with the women, the figurines and Meghan Markle in the background, that is all about femininity and women [Still Life with Shepherdess Figurines]. So the figurines do relate in that. But in the others it wasn’t supposed to be too obvious. Also, people can always interpret them the way they want and sometimes they see quite legitimate things that I never noticed or wasn’t thinking of when I shot them.

STEER: It must be interesting to see how people interpret your work a bit differently than what you intended when you were making it. I’m thinking about the backgrounds and how these are all definitely political images dealing with current political issues. Many of them are pretty hard to take. Really difficult issues that we’ve been dealing with the past couple of years, and some of them are challenging to think about or look at. How did you decide on what the background images would be? Are you just thinking about what’s in the news this week or this month?

MONTMOLLIN: Yes. I got into the state, which I think a lot of people did, of just reading stuff online all the time and especially when Trump was president. Just compulsively, and it all made me so angry. It’s still going on, but I’m not as hooked up to it anymore because I got to the point where I couldn’t stand it. But I guess it was kind of intuitive.

STEER: I like that they’re not heavy-handed political messages, that they’re subtle and people can, as you say, develop their own reading depending on where they’re coming from.

MONTMOLLIN: I’m glad to hear you say that because that was the intention to not make them heavy-handed.

STEER: Some of them are kind of funny. I’ll tell you which one’s my favorite — the one with the Trump heads [Still Life with Squirrel Nutcracker]. The background is composed of pornographic images of women with Trump’s head on their crotch or on their butt, replacing their genitals with his head. Then in the foreground, there is a silver squirrel nutcracker with a bowl of hazelnuts.

MONTMOLLIN: Right.

STEER: This one made me laugh because, well, there is every woman’s fantasy, right? The background is a stereotypical fantasy with these images of women, but wouldn’t many women like to crack Trump’s nuts?.

MONTMOLLIN: I was kind of aware of the nutcracker in that one. But it’s not obviously a nutcracker, right? Well, maybe you recognized it as such but I think if I hadn’t put it in the title, people wouldn’t know it was a nutcracker, really.

STEER: You have these images that appeal to the male gaze and then you replace that object of the gaze with Trump’s face.

MONTMOLLIN: I got the idea for that because every year, apparently it’s worldwide, they have a bicycle naked day, people bicycle naked in the cities. Three years ago or whenever, they had it in Toronto and on BlogTO or one of these websites, whenever there was something that they didn’t want you to see, they put Doug Ford’s head, which I thought was brilliant. And that’s what gave me the idea.

STEER: A great idea! Continuing from this, I see a feminist bent in your work — a lot of your images deal with media representations of women or what women look like in pornography. For instance, the one with Meghan Markle, it’s about how as a person she is reduced to her body in multiple ways. Can you tell me a bit about feminism in your work, in this series or your other series?

MONTMOLLIN: I certainly consider myself a feminist and I have no objection to anyone calling me a feminist artist but I don’t really think of my work with that label. Although in this series it’s obviously a strong impulse. But even before that, my work has always been about women. This is what I do and I don’t think of it as being part of a philosophy or whatever anyone thinks of feminism as being. All my work is always about seeing myself as being a woman in the world. That’s what’s important to me as an artist, being a woman.

STEER: Another one of your provocative works uses images of missing and murdered Indigenous women with the words ‘genocide,’ and ‘culture of silence’ and other quotations that appear to be testimony from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry. And then in the foreground, you have these vintage toys — a vintage First Nations warrior on a horse, for example. But what really stands out is the little wind-up man on a motorcycle with a woman on the back. That really hit me. It is a terrifying image because it speaks to Indigenous women being disappeared along the Highway of Tears, for example. I had a physical reaction when I saw it. I think it is a very powerful juxtaposition and I’m wondering to what extent you had thought about that juxtaposition [Still Life with Old Toys].

MONTMOLLIN: No. I never thought about it. I have things everywhere in my studio and I just put them together. There’s just some kind of weird link in my head. But I was more thinking of them as a still life because in each of those photographs doing the still life was a challenge. To do a really good still life is a challenge. Sometimes they came together really quickly. Other times, I had to work on them a lot more. The background was a challenge too but a different kind of challenge. In fact, that one I worked a lot on it. At first, the faces of the women were less evident then they were more evident. I had to come to a balance of having their faces and yet not really well defined because they were symbolic of a lot of different women.

STEER: All of those women are gone. It’s a disturbing juxtaposition even without thinking about the darkness of the motorcycle. Just that notion of toys and playing while, as you say, in the background something else is going on that we’re not really paying attention to. That to me connects to that notion of silence.

MONTMOLLIN: Those are really difficult subjects. That one, in particular, and the one with the migrants. And then not being Indigenous, you have that kind of almost fear, or I had a kind of fear of, you know, maybe this isn’t my story. I shouldn’t do anything about it or portray it. But on the other hand, it’s everybody’s story. I mean, everybody has a role in it. That’s for sure.

STEER: I agree. It’s a story that we all need to know. And so I guess we’re going to approach it in different ways depending on our background. That is a tricky question though, about whose story is it to tell. I think we’re all kind of grappling with this right now in Canada. Well, hopefully. Some people aren’t grappling with it or they would prefer to keep that culture of silence going and pretend it isn’t happening. Some of these photographs reveal events that are hidden or that have been overlooked.

MONTMOLLIN: One of the things that made me think of it is that I don’t think I’d ever used text in any of my photographs before. People do text art but I had never been interested in doing that. This series was the first time I ever did that just because it required it, I guess.

STEER: Another image that uses text to address violence along with a jarring juxtaposition is the one of Trump’s sons with all the dead animals [Still Life with Spring Market Produce]. Then you have an image of Bambi and the text stating “you fuckers killed my mother!” And then Babar saying, “mine too”, you know–

MONTMOLLIN: Yes. I had forgotten that Babar’s mother was killed by a hunter and I don’t know why that came back.

STEER: Trump’s sons are holding dead animals in these horrible photos. But in the foreground, there’s this beautiful bounty of green and red — lettuce, asparagus, strawberries from the spring market. A contrast between death and life. It also makes me ask “what can the earth provide for us?” And then they’re holding the bloody elephant tail, which is repulsive.

MONTMOLLIN: Yeah. I painted the blood on it though.

STEER: Do you have any more thoughts about that one? What were you thinking about when you created it?

MONTMOLLIN: Just what you’ve said. I mean, again, I didn’t see the juxtaposition. It was random to me. I just happened to be doing it when we were going to the market, and I wanted to do something with all the produce we were buying at the market. So it just happened to be when I was also thinking of, I mean, those Trump sons…you want to kill them.

STEER: Ha! Yeah, the entitlement.

MONTMOLLIN: And just the arrogance and the evilness of killing these great animals.

STEER: It’s horrible.

MONTMOLLIN: It just made me so angry. And with most of this anger, I couldn’t do anything about it. So I did these photographs. That at least eased some of the anger. Except that we had to live with them; Tony said he couldn’t come through my studio anymore.

STEER: (laughs) Because of all these images?

MONTMOLLIN: Yes. He couldn’t come through my studio. He’d have to go around the other way to get to his studio. Especially the angry men [Still Life with Birds]. That one was up for quite a long time.

STEER: They’re very angry. These photos are slightly historical, right, 2019 but here we are in 2021, and there are still all these angry men that are protesting at hospitals now.

MONTMOLLIN: Right.

STEER: Their facial expressions are so intense; we can feel the anger. There are so many photographs circulating all over Twitter, and other social media, that feel so loud, almost oppressive.

MONTMOLLIN: One of them was this young man at some white supremacist thing and his photograph was all over the internet. He was a student somewhere, and he said, “well, you know, that’s not really what I believe in.” Of course! But photography is weird. I mean, you can catch somebody with an expression that doesn’t match the context of the situation. I’m not saying that’s the case with these guys because I think that is who they really are.

STEER: I teach the history of photography and remind my students that photographic truth is constructed. It’s not embedded in the image. We know photos are malleable, and there is a long history of manipulation, which is why found photographs are interesting to use in images like the ones that you’re making because, as we discussed earlier, your works are suggestive and they make connections that ask us to sort of think about these issues, but we don’t necessarily have to take the photographs as an absolute truth in the way you’re using them.

MONTMOLLIN: Exactly. I put them together, I selected them, and it’s all highly subjective.

STEER: I suppose the images we see all the time are like that too, but we tend to forget that someone chooses them or frames them or crops them or uses a particular angle or whatever.

MONTMOLLIN: That’s what I mean. The other day on the internet, I saw this on Facebook: someone was saying that in Denmark libraries, they have this program where you can check out a person, you meet with a person who’s from some other background and you spend fifteen minutes or half an hour with them and you get to hear their experience of life. Instead of borrowing a book, you borrow a person. All the comments were like, “what a wonderful idea” and whatever. And they had a photo of these three tables with two people sitting at each table, and I looked at it, and I thought, “I know this woman!”. I looked in the background and it was a photo taken in Toronto. The Toronto library has exactly the same program. It’s something that’s done in a lot of different places. But you know, it was put in this context of, “Oh in Denmark, they do this really great thing. We should do the same thing.” When, actually, the photo was in disconnection with the post and if I hadn’t recognized somebody in it, I wouldn’t have any idea. It wasn’t a bad thing. Like, other times you get photos that are used for really bad purposes. But this one wasn’t bad. It was just annoying.

STEER: That’s so interesting. I think visual literacy is becoming more and more of an issue –being able to read images and understand them and to notice discrepancies. It was a fluke that you noticed the photo was from Toronto and not Denmark. We live in a world with so many images and it seems as if we’re becoming less able to read them. You know what I mean? How do we figure out what they are, especially now when we have deep fakes and that sort of thing?

MONTMOLLIN: Right, that’s a whole other thing. But the downside of it all for me is that I find it really hard to believe anything that I see. I guess subconsciously I do believe it, but if I stop I think, “well how do I know this is true?” then I don’t know anymore. And not just photos, but also newspaper stories and any story. Especially with social media. There have been so many scams and stuff like that. I preferred life when I could believe people.

STEER: (laughs) The good old days when we could just trust people and look at the images and believe that they’re showing us what they’re showing us.

MONTMOLLIN: Well, with images it was never that way. It was always a thing, you know, the Soviets who used to take people out of photographs and stuff like that. I mean, that has been going on for so long and it was always an issue with photography.

STEER: Definitely.

MONTMOLLIN: But maybe you had to be a photographer to know that or a historian or somebody.

STEER: Maybe, yes, because you would know that from the manipulations you were doing in the darkroom. You discover how easy it is to create something that differs from the “original.” But I don’t find your images to be cynical. I can see in there that there’s a lot of caring. There’s caring about what’s happening in the world. There’s a kind of sadness too, maybe. That’s some of what I see in there.

MONTMOLLIN: I just see the anger.

STEER: I wonder what others see in them. Is there anything else you would like to say about this series we haven’t covered.

MONTMOLLIN: Yes, I wanted to talk about the one photo with the migrants [Still Life with White Bird Figurine].

STEER: Oh, the migrants, yeah. That one is different from the other ones, I thought.

MONTMOLLIN: That one, to me, along with the Indigenous women, is the most powerful one. Partly it’s the text, you know, the “My God’s eye is on the sparrow and that’s how I know he watches over me.” My idea behind it is that God’s eye may be on you and me, but it sure as hell isn’t on those people who are drowning off the coast of Europe. And again, tremendous anger. And sadness too.

STEER: I’m wondering how you feel about the many photographs circulating of migrants in boats or refugee camps. Something I’ve been thinking about is how there are periods of time in the news cycle where we are inundated with certain kinds of photographs, such as those that depict children suffering. There’s research on what kinds of bodies are portrayed in the news as suffering or deceased. What do you think about the fact that those are the bodies that get circulated? Typically, these bodies are not white, North American people. There are ethical issues. And I wonder whether viewers become desensitized to them as well. I’m interested what you think about that, having worked through these difficult images. It’s tough to sit with those photographs – to look at them and think about them and add them together. As you said, you might spend a month working on one image, so you’re sitting here and you’ve got these photos of tremendous suffering. When you’re looking at that for a month, how does that affect you when you’re working with this material?

MONTMOLLIN: Well, it’s hard. It was hard. And that’s why sometimes it took me so long because I would back off from it for a while. But there’s also the issue that it becomes an aesthetic problem; there are all sorts of composition problems and technical issues and so a lot of my time was spent concentrating on those. So I didn’t really see the sadness and the horror all the time even though that is why I was doing it. There’s a whole other side to these photographs, which is just getting them to work.

STEER: A lot of my research has been on difficult photographs. A chapter of my book deals with a crime scene photograph that the surrealists had used as a work of art. A photo of a woman’s eviscerated body. I looked at that for six weeks. I don’t know if this is the same for you, but when you’re working on a problem, you can almost have a kind of separation between your emotional side and your intellectual side, which allows you to really deal with this stuff. Because otherwise, it’s overwhelming and you would be crying and yelling or whatever.

MONTMOLLIN: Yes! That’s what I was trying to explain. There are two sides to it for sure. The other photograph I wanted to talk about, or to just to explain, because I think it’s probably the photo that’s hardest to understand, and that’s the one with what’s his name? Chauvin. The cop who killed George Floyd [I Can’t Breathe].

STEER: Yeah, I found that one a little hard to understand.

MONTMOLLIN: I guess it’s very personal. We were in France when that happened. We actually got locked down in France [during the Covid pandemic] and it was very stressful, but then when this George Floyd horror happened, I just went into this, you know, I could barely move for a couple of days. I was so depressed and it was that guy’s face. Watching that video of him with his face that didn’t show any emotion or anything while he was killing somebody. It was just so horrendous. So the photograph is really a personal visualization of that because the photos are taken around the house we were staying in. And then in this very small town nearby, somebody had written “RIP, I can’t breathe” in graffiti, so that’s in there as well.

STEER: It’s a scene from where you are. So it is referencing what that moment was like for you.

MONTMOLLIN: Yes.

STEER: That makes me think there’s a connection between all the angry male faces and this guy’s face. He’s not even angry. He has that coldness you described. To be able to do something like that and have a cold face. Not even a grimace. No recognition of what he’s doing. It’s actually more terrifying than the angry faces.

MONTMOLLIN: Yes, exactly. So that photograph and then the one next to it, which is called How Many Died Alone?. I did those last year after coming back. I knew I was going to be showing the other photos and I worried about them being out of date by the time the show at NAC came but then I figured a lot of those issues are still happening. But I wanted to have something that was a little bit more current, although I’m not sure that the last photograph is.

STEER: And so these last two, they are visually different too. Maybe because the time is different. They’re bisected diagonally.

MONTMOLLIN: Right, and it’s not really a still life. And then the other one, How Many Died Alone?, doesn’t have a still life in it at all, really.

STEER: How Many Died Alone? — are those two separate photos put together?

MONTMOLLIN: No. It’s one photo. And remind me never to do that again because–

STEER: It looked really hard with the black-and-white, how do you even photograph that?

MONTMOLLIN: I don’t know. But then there’s a rat in it. I don’t know if you’ve noticed–

STEER: Yeah. A plastic rat with red eyes.

MONTMOLLIN: Yes. But he hardly shows up being black on black. That was a hard one to keep. I mean, it worked but I had to actually do a fair amount of Photoshop on that rat just to get him to show up.

STEER: Otherwise, he disappears. So would you say that’s technically the most difficult one?

MONTMOLLIN: Yes.

STEER: And then what are those chairs? The toys are really small. Do you have them here in your studio? Oh they’re just sitting there (points). They look much larger in the photo.

MONTMOLLIN: Well the figures on them are very small, I bought them in France years ago, I was in a department store in the toy department, which I always go to. Here, in North America, they have farm animals and things like that. Well, in France, they had this car accident thing happening.

STEER: (laughs)

MONTMOLLIN: There was the guy on the stretcher and the ambulance attendants and there’s a doctor and a nurse and a photographer who’s come to take a picture. It’s hysterical. And they’re only an inch tall.

STEER: Wow. I love that there’s a photographer though. That’s really fun and weird. You have some great titles. Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the titles?

MONTMOLLIN: Yes. For Hear Me Cry I was really happy that I had the idea to just title them with what was going on in the still life and not to make any comment on the background because that’s the thing about titles. For the longest time, my photographs were always “Untitled” because I felt if you put a title on it, people read the title and then they think they’ve understood the whole thing. If you could explain what you were doing in a title, then why do the image? So sometimes it helps to have a title, but most of the time, I thought it was better not to. And then people just had to do the work. They had to look at it to figure out what it was about.

STEER: And then sometimes the title can just be a punchline where there isn’t a lot more.

MONTMOLLIN: When I was doing them, I was titling them, you know, “Harvey Weinstein” or I’d comment on the background subject matter, you know, like, “Trump Crotch” But those weren’t official titles.

STEER: When I saw the one with Harvey Weinstein [Still Life with Vintage High Heels], I didn’t even recognize him. I think that I blocked that man’s face out of my mind.

MONTMOLLIN: Yes. I had a lot of trouble with that one, it was with the woman going like this (“shhh” gesture). At first I didn’t want to use her. I didn’t want people to think that I was saying that women were complicit in it. Although in some ways, they were, you know, complicit in their silence. But then I just couldn’t do it any other way. I couldn’t figure out what else to put there. So I used that.

STEER: But I thought that was really evocative. Especially because it’s a fashion shot, and she’s very glamorous and beautiful. I think that’s the way that it is with these Hollywood people. It’s like the secret that everyone knows. Everyone would’ve heard about him and what he is.

I suppose it’s time to wrap up. This has been such a thought-provoking conversation. Thanks for inviting me to your studio!

MONTMOLLIN: It’s been a pleasure. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to look at my photographs and the insights you bring to them based on your own knowledge and experience.