“What do we want to learn from plants? » The question underlying the 7e Orange edition is open, so much does it imply that it is up to each of us to answer it. Under the title Cultivate humilitythe current art triennial rooted in Saint-Hyacinthe brings together a dozen artists (all women) and as many examples of what plants can teach us.
It’s not just the plants that are involved. Rocks too, grass, bees and a plethora of microcosms like those to which we listen at the invitation of Maude Arès. The works are available in installations of living and non-living objects, collages, beadwork, photographs, as well as documentary or performance videos. They take place essentially in two places, the Expression exhibition center and the Jardin Daniel A. Séguin (JDAS), a “life-size” laboratory affiliated with the Institut de technologie agroalimentaire du Québec.
Since it took off in 2003, Orange has taken themes out of the agricultural sector that address, through art, the cultivation of the land and the raising of animals. Central until then, the issues related to food are losing importance this time. Curators Elise Anne LaPlante and Véronique Leblanc looked at our relationship with plants before and after their food exploitation.
A garden is like an enclosure that reproduces centuries of human domination over other forms of life. It also reflects, in the eyes of the curators and guest artists, the shameless colonialist attitude towards indigenous cultures and the lack of openness to different ways of thinking.
” [On] is interested in the creation of plural spaces of knowledge and transmission, say LaPlante and Leblanc in the presentation text. This artistic and community event is an invitation to perceive and honor the resistance of plants. [Leur puissance] is probed in their slow growth, their toxicity, their need for interrelations, their capacity for regeneration and their fragility. »
If Orange has already bet on the originality of disturbing proposals – the apartment covered in ketchup by Cosimo Cavallaro, in 2009, for example – the 2022 edition is rather discreet. The presence of plants in a gallery is no longer an anomaly, and listening to nature goes hand in hand with a current that manifested itself in particular in Montreal during the most recent Momenta biennial. The anti-colonial discourse is no longer surprising, so contemporary art must include indigenous voices and those of marginalized groups. At Expression, seeds sown here and there nevertheless open up breaches, suggesting behaviors to adopt. With Plot (2018), installation composed of a tray containing “cultivated” grass and a series of “portraits” of blades of grass made of beads, Carrie Allison points, with delicacy and simplicity, to the territorial possession and division that still determine companies. The collages of small pieces of paper with which Erika DeFreitas imagines plants seem to call for diversity, without establishing a dominant-dominated relationship. By Ileana Hernandez, rock body (2018-2022), video, sound and… vibration installation (it is essential to sit on the bench), gives voice to a rock and makes humans an inferior “soft species”.
Installation Gravity organizes chance (2022), by Maude Arès, takes on the value of an emblematic work. Its dimensions are impressive, even if the work is placed at ground level. The heterogeneous assemblages (twigs, papers, pebbles, bits of string, obsolete objects) that make it up are an almost encyclopedic review of what ends up in nature, waste included. The artist, who at the beginning of 2022 presented a work based on a collection in Montreal wastelands (in duet with Massimo Guerrera), this time drew his finds from water, during a creation residency at the Center Est -North-East of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli.
wise garden
Maude Arès is one of the four artists who also exhibit at the JDAS. His installation here takes on an aerial form, through the multiplication of mobiles suspended above a pond. “The bowl contains the pods of the snow pea, the ear of the earphone, the bell of a drop, the blue cotton thread and the scrap of St. John’s wort fabric”: the subtitle, both poetic and description, of the work evokes the fortuitous encounters that arise in an ecosystem. Its integration with JDAS is anything but aggressive.
In this garden “manufactured” for the needs of scientific research, a sector often singled out by speeches calling for “decolonization”, there is room for disorganization or “de-hierarchization”, another term in vogue. Even if she only exhibits at Expression, Annie-France Leclerc testifies to this, she who recovered the “weeds” rejected by the JDAS. The culture of exclusion becomes the only one to banish.
Another fairly present artist, Joiri Minaya occupies several locations of the JDAS with large images where she performs dressed, from head to toe, with clothes with floral motifs. The artist denounces stereotypes, but the trick of his camouflage ends up being too repetitive. At Expression, his subject is more impactful, as his floral garments cover monuments and thus hide the identity of the characters represented, while better highlighting these urban works, a colonial heritage too often accepted as a norm.