Dr. Julie Hanson, Director Gallery 23, Edinburgh, exhibition notes, Toast to the Lassies, January 2017

“In an age of endless visual information, how do we invent ourselves and envision our own histories? Drawing from literary, film and historical pornography sources, Michele Marcoux’s witty assembly of objects and environments addresses the fragmentary nature of perceptual memory and the manner in which our concepts of identity, sexuality and culture are formed. 

With their acid washed colour and 1950’s porn star silhouettes framed with subtle references to war, bank vaults, and the atom bomb, Marcoux’s reframed ‘pin-ups’ become powerful statements about the female model growing up and taking charge of her own pictorial world. Part of a larger installation entitled, Fan of Memory/Profane Illuminations, Marcoux’s engaging triptych on glass, Alette was influenced by the feminist epic poem The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley. There, the heroine finds herself on a journey deep underground, encountering a series of diverse characters and undergoing metamorphoses as she seeks to confront ‘the Tyrant’ and heal the world. The artist’s triptych also can be viewed as a fascinating gendered response to Marcel Duchamp’s controversial glass work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even c. 1920, offering a cheeky female oriented response.”