Honorer le bois, révéler l’intime

Sculpting wood means entering into the intimacy of the material to give it form. It also means honoring the body to bring out its essence and (re)make sense of it. There’s something surprising in the fact that by removing a volume of skin or flesh, we can both access its interiority, even its intimacy, and recompose a body with a silhouette distinct from the original one. The loss of material reveals the essence of the wood and, as Florence de Mèredieu puts it, its analysis enables us to “reconstitute the entire genealogy of the work1″(Florence de Mèredieu, Histoire matérielle et immatérielle de l’art moderne et contemporain, Paris, Larousse, 2008, p. 175.)

For Ingrid Syage Tremblay, this genealogy has its origins in the art of textiles, with a nod to the ornamental and decorative plant world. In Tapisserie, a sculpture conceived in the manner of a folding tapestry, plant forms are linked together. Their suppleness resonates with the work of the artist, who sculpts wood in such a way as to bring out a malleability that belies its usual density, to the point of revealing a mesh in Les derniers crépuscules. Here, the carving does not remain on the surface; the artist neither engraves nor draws a shape. Rather, it passes through the material to create an openwork pattern. If the evocation of the moucharabieh floats around the work, inviting reflection on the intimate, the reference to lace asserts itself, bringing out links that are as much plastic as they are iconic. The plastic dimension of wood echoes and superimposes a significance on the form of the work, amplifying its meaning. If you look at this fibrous material through a microscope, you’ll see a myriad of filaments spaced out in a vacuum. It took time and patience for the tree to expand and its internal network to unfold. It also takes time and patience for the lace-maker to weave her fabric. Not to mention the repetition of the gesture, which places the action in an almost meditative level of consciousness, in an intimate space.

Mathieu Gotti‘s intimacy is expressed in the Disparition de soi, the installation’s title. The artist carves wood to give body: a naked woman, sculpted from a piece of white pine, faces a black dog, both separated, or joined, from each other by a path of ash.The woman’s nudity leads us into a private realm, an inner sanctuary or place of comtemplation where it is still possible to dream and find oneself, if only for a moment. Mathieu Gotti doesn’t present one version of things; he doesn’t lock the installation into a single narrative. He advocates a polysemic reading that creates a tense space between good and evil, animal and human, illness and health. Does the dog standing in front of the woman represent the blackness of the human it metaphorizes? Or is his soothing mouth a reminder that he is also “man’s best friend”, both gentle and reassuring? What if self-abandonment were a necessary transitional stage? A clean slate that, like fire, destroys or deconstructs, but which also, according to the mythical tale of the Phoenix, allows us to rise from our ashes, the ultimate abandonment of matter by virtue of rebirth.

Myriam Simard-Parent, for her part, observes the principles of a return to the self by dissecting the time of her adolescence. Here, the genealogy of the work is intimately linked to that of the artist. Myriam Simard Parent’s parents were biologists, and she grew up in close contact with nature. As far back as she can remember, plants gathered here and there in the Quebec wilderness have always shared the family table before being analyzed, classified and catalogued. And then, as a teenager, American pop culture invited itself to the artist’s table, creating a clash. The nature/culture duality thus played a part in defining an identity that the artist revisits in his works in a playful, even satyrical way. While the milk crate and ice cream revive memories of her first job, the beer bottles take her back to the first prohibitions, and the banana peel to her own vulnerability at the time. It’s in a spirit of nostalgia that she addresses the defining moments of this phase.

In this exhibition, the artists honor wood, recalling its beauty and sacred nature while placing its iconic potential at the service of intimate expression.

Text by Émilie Granjon

Author Bio

Émilie Granjon holds a DESS in Cultural Organization Management from HEC Montréal, which she obtained in 2015, and has been running the CIRCA Art Actuel artist-run center since May 2016. She is also an essayist and art critic, as well as an independent curator. With a PhD in semiology from UQAM in 2008, she analyzes the cultural issues of current art through the study of unusual figures. In her thesis, she focused on the semiogenesis of alchemical symbolism in Atalanta fugiens (1617), and published Comprendre la symbolique alchimique (PUL: Québec, 2012). In contemporary art, she co-authored with Fabienne Claire Caland Cinq fabricants d’univers dans l’art actuel (Nota Bene: Montréal, 2017) and, more recently, also with Véronique La Perrière M. Le miroir, la métaphore et le temps inversé (Sagamie: Alma, 2020).

Artists Bio

Mathieu Gotti was born in France and since 2006, he has lived in Quebec City. An enthusiast of collective projects, he participated in the founding of several artists’ groups, which enabled him to meet a very broad public and develop his interest in interactivity and mediation. In 2015, Mathieu Gotti began working mainly on his own sculpture projects, and has presented his work at exhibitions in Quebec and Canada. These include Ce qui nous rend humains at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) in 2020, Compression Boréale at the Musée de la civilisation in 2010, Fonderie polaire at Vrille Art actuel in La Pocatière in 2015 and Changements climatiques at the Centre culturel franco-manitobain in Winnipeg in 2016. He has received numerous bursaries and awards, and was a finalist for the Prix d’excellence des arts et de la culture 2018 (Prix Émergence en métiers d’art).

Myriam Simard-Parent received a Bachelor’s degree in Visual and Media Arts from Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in 2020 and a Master’s degree in Sculpture and Ceramics from Concordia University in 2023. Wood is the material that distinguishes her sculpture work, which is produced primarily through direct hand carving, using knives and electric rotary tools. She selects her material from various native North American species, and also makes use of found wood to create objects that refer to personal experiences, stemming from domestic space and popular culture.

Of Québéco-Syrian origin, Ingrid Syage Tremblay lives and works in Montreal. Recently, she has exhibited her work at the Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris, Apexart in New York, Chiguer art contemporain Québec, Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Centre des arts actuels Skol in Montreal, Projet Casa in Montreal and Transmitter in New York. She has also been an artist-in-residence at Est-Nord-Est, at NARS Foundation in New York, the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center in Vermont, Djerassi in California, the VCUarts Fountainhead Fellowship in Sculpture in Virginia, ACRE in Wisconsin, the Terra Vivente Art Studio in Italy and the Vermont Studio Center. Syage Tremblay received her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018, for which she was a recipient of the UT Graduate School Recruitment Fellowship.

Acknowledgements

Mathieu Gotti :
Raymond Caron and Réal d’Amour

Ingrid Syage Tremblay :
Nicolas and Jasmine Bel, Paz Godoy, Virginia Valdez Ruiz, Richard Caron, Aurélie Dubois, Myriam Simard-Parent, Mathieu Gotti, Émilie Granjon, Mariana Jiménez and the entire CIRCA art actuel team.
Photo credit: Lolita Perez