Jugnet + Clairet: D.A.A.A.

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 titled D.A.A.A, after the gymnasium’s acronym. 

They worked after Bill Morrison's documentary ‘Dawson City: Frozen Time’ (2016.) The film recounts the discovery of a trove of nitrate films in Dawson City, a frontier boomtown during the gold rush and the end of the distribution chain for flammable newsreels produced by Hollywood. For their series D.A.A.A, Jugnet + Clairet selected a sequence of a 1919 newsreel reporting an explosion caused by a letter bomb sent by anarchists - explosion ironically reminiscent of the fires caused by nitrate films.

In large acrylic paintings and smaller related watercolors, the artists created compositions that evoke both the subject of the newsreel and the physical deterioration of the nitrate film itself. The result is a series of constructed objects based on the deconstruction of an original image and is a part of a larger, ongoing inquiry into the nature of perception.

“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, the other by means of stencils, thus seeking to create a significant relief, even a hollow, in the pictorial layer.”

The smoky grayscale swaths occupying the major portions of the compositions are also representations: the blinding whiteout at the instant of an image’s obliteration that references, in an oblique way, the transitory nature of imagery itself. 

D.A.A.A. is part of the Background Series, a larger body of work referring to the backgrounds in paintings, films, and graphic novels. For each project, Jugnet + Clairet establish specific protocols and processes that aim at creating the conditions for the emergence of new forms.

“Our work explores and develops that which escapes the ordinary attention of the surrounding world: the rarity of information, discrete units, minor changes, details, intervals, and in-betweens. Our point of view is peripheral, we are interested in the margins, the background, the depths.”

Jugnet + Clairet, both French-born, have been the subjects of exhibitions at prestigious institutions across Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva, Switzerland, and the Pompidou Center, which also have the artists’ works in their collections.

The work of Jugnet + Clairet was recently included in the Museum of Modern Art, Paris’ exhibition The Atomic Age, curated by Maria Stavrinaki and Julia Garimorth (October 11, 2024 - February 9, 2025.)