La gravité organise les hasards

-Gallery I & II-

La gravité organise les hasards : les pépins de cantaloup germent dans l’empreinte du ballon, mi-aile de papillon, mi-noirceur d’une pièce sans fenêtre.

My sculptures have precarious lives. They break, fall apart and generate new unforeseeable forms, all at their own pace. From one project to the next, I use and reuse the same sculptures and materials, constantly adjusting and reconfiguring their shapes, colours and textures. My work emerges from the cycles inherent to physical matter, and is a reaction to these cycles’ varying states and possibilities.

La gravité organise les hasards can be broken down into several interconnected phases; some have already been created, while others are yet to come. The phase presented at CIRCA, Les pépins de cantaloup germent dans l’empreinte du ballon, mi-aile de papillon, mi-noirceur d’une pièce sans fenêtre, is a site-specific installation that draws attention to the material energies and phenomena that exist within the fragile web of the mobiles, basins and found objects. These elements are all intimately intertwined, and every current of air and movement of passing visitor affects the entire network. The installation evolves according to the physical phenomena at work and to the different interventions I plan to carry out during the exhibition.

-Text by Maude Arès

The morning is quiet and sunny in this industrial neighbourhood in the north of Montreal. It’s late summer, or early fall. Maude has invited me to visit her studio. We eat grapes, and chat about this and that: her recent projects, beach debris, the unpredictability of the wind. At a certain point in the conversation, Maude holds up a small plastic bowl. See? It’s a container. But, if you turn it over, it becomes a shelter. Listening to her talk about her relationship to objects, art-making, and the world, I mimic this simple gesture absentmindedly. Right-side-up, upside-down. Upside-down, right-side-up. This movement seems to echo Maude’s work: everything is reversible, changeable, and always evolving. Sometimes it’s the artist who decides, sometimes it’s the wind. Often, it’s gravity. You close your eyes for a few seconds, you think about the weight of all things. And then you open them again, and everything is new and different.

The big world contains big dangers.

Other worlds welcome the wind.

This one is a trembling hand.

That one is a dead leaf.

Thank goodness.

This movement of air has nothing to do with the eyes.

But we have to keep them open.

The low stool offers up a rupture that never stops rupturing.

All the same, our outer shell remains waterproof.

We mustn’t miss the droplet’s arrival.

It will come from above.

Look!

We can make a shelter.

We can arrange our fragments on the ground.

We can keep an eye on the sky.

Look!

The air is a murky current.

I love you, air.

Nothing geometric under the sun.

Look!

Water arrives with translucent warnings.

I love you, water.

I love you like a current.

Like a falling grape.

Like a vapour that takes us aback.

It changes into particles.

It changes everything.

Whether or not you stay close, or blindly drift away.

It falls, it accumulates,

it overcomes the order of what contains,

the order of what is contained.

It overcomes what we think order is.

Look!

Leaf floats.

Leaf!

You can’t be grass.

Grass is its own self.

It stands up strong to deliberate juice.

Frivolous friction.

We’re nearing shore.

Yes, leaf floats.

Yes, everything is connected.

When it flows, when it contains.

When it all trickles down to the same sunrise.

The one that doesn’t yet exist.

Look!

My eye is a plant.

Lost like a hair in the darkest nest.

Who sees true?

Our friend droplet.

A friend of a friend.

Look.

No-one dies from too much crying.

No-one dies ever, really.

Bowl catches and contains.

Bowl pours.

Maybe we’re already alive.

In a world close to other worlds.

Closer than we thought.

A leaf on the ground, a leaf in the mouth.

All is dense.

Make us full like an eye that is a plant.

Make us laugh.

Chime, ring, and fall.

Ring no more.

String pulls.

Sun-head pulls down and suckles.

You wanted to be close to the things of the world.

Shell shifts for its own self.

Shelter becomes oracle.

Fragments take their rightful place.

Choices make themselves.

We’re here, still suspended on our strings.

We stretch it out.

Further and further.

Our floor is a roof.

Our toes are stones.

Evergreen branch aluminum.

Pottery leaf of salty waters.

Mound takes a bath.

Fragment is island.

You wanted to be close.

You are close.

We feel you, close.

-Text by Simon Brown

Author Biography

Simon Brown (he/they) is a poet, translator and interdisciplinary artist from southwestern New Brunswick (Peskotomuhkati traditional territory) based in the Quebec City area (Wendat and Abenaki traditional territory). Simon’s written works, chapbooks and artist books have been published in Quebec, Canada and France by Le laps, Vanloo, squint, Frog Hollow, above/ground, and Moult, among others. Simon has been an artist-in-residence in various contexts, such as Viva Art Action (Montreal), Banff Centre (Banff), Vaste et Vague (Carleton), le Mois de la poésie (Quebec City), le Mois Multi (Quebec City) and Littérature québécoise mobile’s Particules (Montreal). simonbrown.ca

Artist Biography

Maude Arès is an interdisciplinary artist, who works in installation, sculpture, performance, set design and drawing. In her practice, she explores the sensory relationships between various found materials. By combining and configuring these materials in different ways, Maude’s artworks become the stage for vulnerable environments that invite us to pay close attention to the subtilities of the tangible world around us. She channels her reflections on the performativity of materials and the actions that give them life via projects that bring together the visual and performative arts. Through attentiveness to the energy and activity of the physical world, she observes the visible and invisible relationships of interdependency that connect humans and non-humans.

Maude’s individual and collective projects have been presented in Quebec and Colombia at artist-run centres and theatres (Théâtre La Chapelle, B-312, Tangente, Théâtre Aux Écuries, Galerie de l’UQAM, Campos de Gutiérrez, Centre de design, Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art), and in the context of various events (OFFTA, Nuit Blanche à Montréal, ORANGE – L’événement d’art actuel de Sainte-Hyacinthe, Chromatic, OUF! – Festival Off Casteliers).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Alexia Laferté-Coutu, Simon Brown, Gabrielle Harnois-Blouin, Guy Blouin, Dominique Rivard, Daniel Pelchat, Massimo Guerrera, Simon Labbé, Laurent Wermenlinger, Thibaut Quinchon, Sarah-Jeanne Riberdy, Carolyne Scenna, Jean-Michel Leclerc, Vincent Lafrance and Samuel Gougoux.

Thank you to my family and friends.

Thanks to Rozynski Art Centre, Est-Nord-Est, ORANGE, l’événement d’art actuel de Sainte-Hyacinthe, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Article by Nicolas Mavrikakis on the exhibition of Maude Arès for Le Devoir : https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/arts-visuels/777659/arts-visuels-maude-ares-la-realite-des-choses

Photo credit : Jean-Michael Seminaro