Aujourd'hui je pleure parce que @ Pangée Gallery

 

Curated by Jezabel Plamondon
July 17 to August 16, 2025 @ Pangée, 1305 ave des Pins Ouest, Montreal

𝐴𝑢𝑗𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑑'ℎ𝑢𝑖 𝑗𝑒 𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑐𝑒 𝑞𝑢𝑒 is an intergenerational exhibition showcasing works by Jacqueline Beaumont, Sylvie Cotton, Alegria Gobeil, Cindy Hill, Sophie Jodoin & John Boyle Singfield. This exhibition is about crying and the need to give form to our experiences.

The exhibition makes room for the distances that emerge when we question the act of crying. The distance between the person crying and the reason for their tears, the distance between the one who cries and the one who offers comfort, the distance between who we are in the midst of tears and who we are after the breakdown. The distance between the tears and what we make of them, the distance between the absent and their absence. The distance between the last tears and the next.

Text by Jézabel Plamondon

Photographic Documentation by William Sabourin (Atlas Documentation)

369

Materials:  Artist's Tears, Polypropylene, Methacrylate

In 2018, the TGEU issued a press release on Transgender Day of Remembrance, reporting 369 transphobically motivated murders executed globally throughout 2017—each digit representing a life extinguished by hate. This stark accounting falls short of capturing all cases worldwide, as many trans and gender-diverse murder victims are misidentified in autopsy reports, erasing their individuality, leaving them undocumented and permanently misgendered. These figures require nuanced interpretation within their racialized, social, political, economic, and historical contexts, particularly given the increasing visibility/fetishization of transgender individuals in the West and the varying levels of cultural acceptance globally. 

In response to this accounting, I have collected 369 of my own tears, each preserved in microcentrifuge tubes —small plastic vessels used to suspend biological matter in time. What began as a methodical mourning practice, my grief expressed in saltwater, transforms into something approaching the sacred, a burial rite. The precision of scientific preservation cradles the immeasurable weight of loss, creating a memorial that insists on reverence for our most vulnerable while exposing how little our society values transgender existence. We have always sought containers for our grief. 

Found in crypts throughout Antiquity, artifacts known as Lachrymatory vessels were not filled with tears, as the romantic myth would have it, but with perfumed oils meant to soothe the soul of the departed and distract the senses of the mourners. Yet, the thought of a "tear-collecting vessel" persists in museology because it serves a purpose. While humans elevate mourning to an art form, crafting elaborate rituals around loss, Swaths of animals will memorialize their deceased through behavioural actions and genetic memory. These impulses reveal something essential: our desperate need to make the incorporeal, corporeal, to hold what cannot be held. despite archaeology debunking the tear-collecting vessel, it's mythic power endures—a testament to our refusal to let sorrow remain only a feeling, our insistence that grief, too, deserves preservation.