Sharone Lifschitz

The title of the series is taken from the film Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), directed by Jacques Demy. In it, Yvonne (Danielle Darrieux) pines after former fiancé Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli), whom she left due to the embarrassing prospect of being called ‘Madame Dame’. Madame Dame, however, is concerned with the grime of the diner and the greasy arrangements of letters and their adaptations, which are created by the owners of the greasy spoon café over a generation. It navigates the territory where a story stops holding together and is fuelled by the fear of ridicule, unwarranted grandeur, a collapse of language and fantastical proclamations.

The leaderboards are created from existing letter boards that were originally used as advertisements (for example, for Coca-Cola or for Kodak film), as menus in diners, or as announcement boards in funeral parlors, hotels, or conference halls. Lifschitz transforms these found objects into wall-hung vehicles for concrete poetry, sometimes adding lighting. She reworks existing texts and adds new ones, creating layers of language and imagery from the existing letters in her inventory.