Salle 1
BLAISE CARRIER-CHOUINARD
Léthé
In bringing us Lethe, an imposing installation composed of sets and numerous mannequins borrowed from the museum of the Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré basilica, Blaise Carrier-Chouinard literally takes Clark's gallery space by assault. One is presented with what seems to be a large historical scene, epic and tragic, in which the vast themes and stakes of human history struggle together, but one finds oneself unable to pull from it an interpretation. It is, one might say, the index of a “bastardized” history, distorted by its author, a tapestry woven from anachronisms and an overflowing heterogeneity, mid-way between a scene from Body Snatchers by Abel Ferrara and a colonial episode taking place by a raft-filled stream in Nouvelle-France.
The artist is more interested in representation, in the “singularization of foundational myths,” than in things themselves. His historical sketches are presented as might be required by the museological norms of a natural history institution, or some other thematic museum. Here, however, the care given to the details of historical costumes, or to the artist's meticulously-crafted heads - now resting on time-damaged mannequins - clashes with the papier mache bric-a-brac and other objects resting strewn about, like intriguing polymer fetuses hung from the structure supporting the river and its raftsmen. Lethe, one of the five rivers of hell, is also the river of forgetting, a waterway from which the dead drink to lose their memory (and identity) and return to earth to make History. This strange collage defies the collective memory enterprise in which humanity engages through writing History. It does this by finding the meaning in its incongruities, its back-and-forths and the necessarily subjective readings we must make of it.
YP
Translated by PduB
The artist wishes to thank CLARK,s Artists Residency Program, L'atelier Clark, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Sancutuaire Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré.
Photo: B.C.C. |
Salle 2
ÉRIC CARDINAL
Amas, fatras, îlots
Toothpicks, paper bags, steel wool, adhesive tape, chairs, occasional furniture, scraps of cardboard, tie-wraps and many other easy-to-find objects - or those simply tossed aside on his studio floor - become images in Éric Cardinal's work. They are attached, glued, plastered, brought together to “try to exist” in their new forms. The elements that make up these sculptures are, for the most part, disposable, replaceable - and here no effort is made to recycle them. They take on sense in their amalgamation, their quantity, in the weight of their boundless consumption and their - sometimes minimal - transformation. They are, says the artist, “consumable and fungible, therefore, ephemeral and infinite.” These objects evoke and do not try to show, nor - how much less - to criticize. They are best understood in the encounter of their forms, and they appeal to an internal logic of the ensemble to generate aesthetic micro-situations.
Cardinal is particularly interested in the formal potential of these objects and - without any hierarchy of value - in the materials of which they are made up. In the gallery, dozens of accumulated sculptures create all kinds of organic mass. The piles of matter transform and interpenetrate, give place to protean and carnivorous structures that seem to strain here and there and contaminate each other, or decompose. Eric Cardinal's hybridizations are to be approached eye to eye. They offer themselves up like a rigged botany, one resistant, not to say impenetrable, to any rigorous taxonomy. They are understood in their disjunctions and for their plastic proprieties, their formal ruptures… as one might approach the study of an extraordinarily rare garden and the obscure species found therein.
YP
Translated by PduB
The artist wishes to thank
the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec
Photo: E.C. |
