Matérialité

 

Matérialité

In the converging of archaeology, sociology, art history, philosophy and anthropology, and from an anachronistic perspective, the imprint and trace act as individual and collective memory that plays with the porosity of temporal boundaries. The imprint and the trace thus are placed in the discursive field of persistence and survival, concepts dear to Georges Didi-Huberman. At the technical level, both engage memory from  the perspective of a sign, playing constantly with the presence and absence of the referenced object. This way the negative and the positive, the void and the full, the uniqueness and the reproducibility confront each other and nourish each other. Andrée-Anne Carrier, Alexia Laferté Coutu, Annie Charland-Thibodeau and Annie Conceicao-Rivet have created imprints and traces that renew our vision of artistic heritage, both artistic and architectural.

Video on Annie Charland-Thibodeau’s work by Camille Godin.

Video on Alexia Laferté Coutu’s work by Camille Godin.

Video on Andrée-Anne Carrier’s work by Camille Godin.

 

Video on Annie Conceicao-Rivet’s work by Camille Godin.

 

Andrée-Anne Carrier proceeds by inversion, on one hand to lend credibility to the field of construction, and on the other to put classical statuary in everyday life or even the domestic sphere. Thus, the artist changes the codes of the sacred for those of the everyday in an artistic expression that is not without humour. In the work Architecture des curiosités, it is difficult to see the coloured statue inserted, upside down, in a cube of chalky plaster. Evidence of a cold and uniform urbanity, would this cube have engulfed it? Looking closely at the work, the viewer will be able to see the buried figures, experiencing almost an archaeological discovery. The work Trophées inversés presents a series of trophies dipped in a mixture of liquid ceramic and sand, a refractory substance used in the lost wax process of bronze casting. This sandy substance is reminiscent of ancient amphorae covered with a thick layer of clay. But under the porous coating, it is no longer bronze: the trophies are made of plastic. Could these contemporary relics represent a tangible and intangible heritage in the making?

Alexia Laferté Coutu’s proposal also is rooted in an architectural heritage perspective, using historical buildings. Her works are many impressions that feed on a specific place and a precise time. With this new cast glass corpus, it is London of the mid-19th century that she reveals. While walking around the city, the artist was seduced by drinking fountains dating from the Victorian era, designed with a redemptive viewpoint,  following the cholera epidemic of 1853. She then makes a rich, singular gesture, a sign, applying clay to certain parts of these urban landmarks in the manner of a poultice, “old-fashioned therapy of applying a mixture of clay and plants to a part of the body, which will absorb the toxins.”¹ Her curative gesture thus joins the very history of the monument on which it is applied. These imprints were subsequently moulded, before the glass was cast, intensifying the aesthetic vocation of an object, both architectural and sculptural, that punctuates the cartography of the city.

Annie Charland-Thibodeau also finds fruitful avenues of reflection in architecture and territory. The starting point for her artistic work is  to explore old quarries and to collect granite fragments stemming from monuments that man has destroyed. In this series Les étendues, the artist evokes the process of transforming stone, at times leaving it in its raw state, other times polishing it. This link between nature and artifice, and also between past and present, calls for a memorial act. A mixture of poetry and intuition, these “false vestiges”²  are new constructions that stimulate reflection about both the material and immaterial territory. In addition, the artist looks critically at space and the setting up of space through in situ work. This is how “echoes are woven back and forth between the specificities of the place of reception and the additions built for the installation.”³ By collecting the raw material, altering it and then restoring it in a new place, Charland-Thibodeau leads us into an ambiguous narrative full of mystery.

For her work, Annie Conceicao-Rivet engages in a dialogue with materials rarely brought into contact: glass and copper. A certain loosening of control then was essential for the artist. Nothing could anticipate the form the sculpture will take; the material dictates the outcome in a work of imprints and stratifying layers. The body of work proposes a meeting between engraved copper plates that the artist recovered from her printmaking studio, and thermoformed glass, which stems from her recent research for Chercher à effacer la lumière. The body of work push the physical limits of the glass in order to observe its reaction in contact with the plates. How does it adapt to copper? How does it compose its own imprint from that of another material? Behind this work of taking form, there is a will. to make visible the invisible, but also to make a work of memory. Furthermore, the union of these two materials enables matter to be revealed, or even appear in a new form and evoke a new materiality.

Andrée-Anne Carrier, Alexia Laferté Coutu, Annie Charland-Thibodeau and Annie Conceicao-Rivet make a gesture in the material, and leave their mark on it. Using collective memory and quasi-cellular memory, these artists participate in a redefinition, if not renewal, of the material and immaterial history of matter and reaffirm the place of artistic and built heritage as timelessly rooted in our humanity.

– Charline Giroud and Émilie Granjon, curators

¹ Approach of the artist

² Ibid

³ Ibid

Émilie Granjon

Émilie Granjon, an art theorist, essayist and independent curator, has been director of the artist-run centre CIRCA since May 2016. She holds a DESS in Cultural Organization Management (2015, HEC Montréal) and a PhD in Semiology (2008, UQAM). In 2012, she published Comprendre la symbolique alchimique (PUL: Québec), and then in 2017, she and Fabienne Claire Caland co-wrote Cinq fabricants d’univers (Nota Bene: Montréal). Three years later, the two authors published Miroirs, métamorphose et temps inversé, on the work of Véronique La Perrière M. (Centre Sagamie, Alma). Emilie Granjon curated the exhibition Déjouer les sens at Centre d’art Jacques-et-Michel Auger in Victoriaville in 2017, which is touring Quebec in 2020-2021, then in 2019, she and Laurent Lamarche co-organized the group exhibition LUMINA at Stewart Hall Gallery in Pointe-Claire.

Charline Giroud

After a career as a professional and an academic in the field of marketing and sales in France, Charline Giroud decided to change direction and go into the arts. She attended evening classes at the Ecole du Louvre for two years and then moved to Montreal to enroll in a baccalaureate in Art History and Museology at UQÀM. She has been actively participating in the Montreal cultural and artistic scene, becoming involved in various organizations such as the museum at Maison Saint Gabriel and the Association of Théâtres Unis Enfance Jeunesse. Charline is also an editor for the art magazine Ex_situ.  Since January 2019, she has been active at CIRCA, collaborating with Emilie Granjon as a co-curator to organize the exhibition Materialité.

Artists Biographies

ANDRÉE-ANNE CARRIER’s work explores notions of familiarity, perception and material reality through the différent form of objects. Her artistic practice becomes a space for questioning our sensory relationship to objects from mass culture that have no heart, such as wall objects or containers (inflatables, packaging, ceramic trinkets, kitsch vases and so on.) Carrier approaches space as a place of relations and tensions between form, counter-form, surface, the solid and the void. The explored spatial relationships direct the connections between things as containers or contents. In her approach to sculpture, Carrier seems to take pleasure in disturbing the material integrity of things, as if experiencing an object’s substance would enable us to understand its reality and thus revealits other dimensions.

ANNIE CHARLAND THIBODEAU lives in Quebec City where she received her training in sculpture. Her work has been presented at various events and solo exhibitions throughout Quebec, such as at Centre Bang, Centre Regart, Axenéo7 and the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke. She also has taken part in artist residencies and exhibited her work abroad: in Ireland, Italy, Iceland and Slovenia. She is currently studying for a Master’s degree in Performative Arts at the Iceland University of the Arts/ Listaháskóli Íslands where she examines the concepts of monumentality and the performativity of objects.

ANNIE CONCEICAO-RIVET’s practice is concerned mainly with sculpture and printed art. She is the recipient of two grants from SODEC (2013 and 2016) as well as from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (2010, 2012). In 2019, Conceicao-Rivet received support from the Conseil des arts de Longueuil for her project Chercher à effacer la lumière. Her intention was to test the potential of glass as creative material in sculpture. In the summer of 2020, she had a residency at Maison Rollin-Brais (Longueuil) to develop a new body of work, which will be presented in a group exhibition in 2021 at Circa art actuel (Montréal).

ALEXIA LAFERTÉ COUTU’s sculptural and installation practice establishes a dialogue between somatic experience and constructed history By using transfer and recovery processes, . Originally from Montreal, Laferté Coutu studied fine arts at Concordia University and at Bauhaus Universität Weimar, and she holds a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from Université du Québec à Montréal (2019). Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Canada (Galerie de l’UQAM, Projet Pangée), the United Kingdom (Unit 1 Gallery) and South Korea (DOOSAN Gallery).

Special thanks from the artists:

Andrée-Anne Carrier would like to thank Jules Lasalle for having generously opened the doors of his workshop, for sharing his knowledge and also the members responsible of the Atelier La Coulée for their technical support and their unlimited openness to experimentation.

Annie Charland-Thibodeau would like to thank the Axenéo7 and the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke, which hosted the first version of her work in 2018.

Annie Conceicao-Rivet thanks the Conseil des arts de Longueuil, the Cégep Édouard-Montpetit, l’Atelier Verre design, Guy Loyer, Olivier Laporte, Maxime Cardyn-Oriani, Francois-Alfred Migneault and all the other people who helped her in this project.

Alexia Laferté Coutu would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their support, Marc-André Fontaine, Éric Saindon and Louis Thompson for their technical assistance and help in carrying out this work.