Echelle 1:1
- Marie-France BRIERE
I would like to enrich the gallery space with experiences embedded in sculpture, architecture, and landscape that are linked to my everyday encounters and to my diverse explorations within my recent public art practice.
Using the idea of scale reproduction, duplicated objects, and blocks of stone as working models to be metamorphosed in the artistic process, this installation is also influenced by my use of a formal vocabulary based on mineral structures. Landscape of quarries, cliff-sides, and mirrors of marble inspire a slopped citadel, consisting of an assemblage of hemlock trestles, and a large group of plaster slabs made from moulds of the same hemlock timbers, resting in steep piles like so many slate-like mineral formations. In these processes, material becomes surface, an embodiment of their own fabrication procedures. Plaster, through a physical transformation, assumes the role of wood with material integrity.
Material construction beckons us to amble in a space where what we perceive is endless, never producing a conclusion. I give form according to my comprehension of a working met hodology that oscillates between life-size surface and vertical linkages. In this laboratory, from which imaginary architecture arises, my work relies on the idea of a setting that combines the singularity of rocky cliff-sides and the cartography of remnant traces.
Born in Montréal in 1957, Marie-France Brière obtained a Master of Fine Art degree from Université du Québec à Montréal. She is the recipient of many grants from the Conseil de Arts et des Lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts, and was awarded the Louis Comptois Prize in 1996. For many years, Marie-France Brière dedicated her art practice to sculpture; however, recently she has become interested in creating public art works, and is attempting to blend genres and suggest that the reading of an object is both complex and poetic. For the integration of art into architecture program, she has produced numerous projects for both exterior and interior sites, notably, at the new Science Pavilion of John Abbot College, at the Concordia University Centre for Structural and Functional Genomics, at the Strathcona Pavilion of McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, at the Conser vatoire d’art dramatique et de musique du Québec à Montréal, at the Society for Art and Technology and at the Cinémathèque Québécoise.
