The artist and filmmaker Myriam Jacob-Allard works with video, performance, installation, and craftsmanship. In her artistic practice, she engages with the visual and sonic codes of popular cultural narratives and explores their inscriptions in collective and personal memory. Particularly, Québec-style country music, Western clichés, and folk song traditions serve as a starting point for a critical, sometimes humorous exploration of matrilineal storytelling, cultural transmission, and the fractures within family and societal archives.
Through reinterpretation, appropriation, and deconstruction, she develops a visual and acoustic “Oral Herstory,” where personal biographies overlap with collective imaginations. Her works combine nostalgia with subversive interventions, questioning traditional gender roles and the mechanisms of cultural memory. With a keen sensitivity to the poetic power of popular aesthetics, her works reflect on issues of identity, gender, and tradition, offering poetically subversive counter-narratives to hegemonic storytelling forms.
In her recent films Les immortelles and Les quatre récits d’Alice, a deeper exploration of memory and identity unfolds. Les immortelles is a video collage in four chapters that revolves around mother-daughter relationships and the question of immortality. Using dubbed vampire films and private family footage, the film addresses the shifting and extension of life and memory through generational relationships.
Les quatre récits d’Alice, on the other hand, focuses on a story passed down by Jacob-Allard’s grandmother about a storm that, as a child, “swept her into the air.” The film combines various versions of this story that Jacob-Allard recorded over a ten-year period, examining the transformation of memory over time. By combining amateur footage and a green-screen weather report, which Jacob-Allard lip-syncs, the film highlights the subjectivity of memory and its transformation across generations.
In both films, Jacob-Allard intertwines personal narratives with cultural symbols and media images, creating a reflection on the construction of identity, the transmission of stories, and the subjective nature of memory.