Betty Pomerleau
No Stone Unturned
August 28–October 3, 2026
Sylvie Bélanger & Edith and Gerald Jackson Galleries

Opening Reception: August 28, 7–10pm
Artist Talk: August 29, 2pm

Everyone carries techniques in their body. Gestures, inflections, accents: a stumbling gait born of a sore hip; a flick of the hair when it blocks the eyes; a way of holding the knife while peeling an apple. These lived techniques – or internalized, often unconscious “habitus” – comprise our embodied selfhood. They feel natural and unique and yet they are forged in repetition. Some techniques are more recognizable as such. Sports, for instance, might feel more blatantly manipulative of a body trained to succeed.

In theatre arts, technique might not be so clearly instrumental. The craftsmanship of performance sometimes dovetails with sleight of hand: a trick of perception that invites curiosity or prompts one to question the boundaries of authorship or subjecthood.

Consider, for example, the souffleur, the person who whispers lines to actors (historically from beneath the floor of the stage), originating in Medieval theatre. The souffleur is the actor’s double, or their haunting, not in body but in breath. The technique they engage is cast like a net between multiple people. The words breathed evoke a ghostly co-authorship, a shared performance that is moored in writing or language itself. As Roland Barthes puts it, “to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality [...] that point where language alone acts or performs, and not oneself.” Operating somewhere between manipulation and collaboration, a souffleur keeps the machine going, and gives that machine a kind of selfhood; the choreographed script of the play cannot chug along without those forgotten words, secretly delivered from below into the mouth of the one who speaks.

— Text by Hilary Bergen