Grantham Foundation | A balance of life to be implanted

New exhibition this fall at the Grantham Foundation for Art and the Environment. Curating Montrealer Ji-Yoon Han is an invitation to root an ecological approach in our lives. It translates to Reciprocity exercises, a demanding exhibition of works by artists from different backgrounds. An enriching experience 1 hour 15 minutes from Montreal!

Eric Clement
The Press

It is always a bit annoying to find the same quality in the same place as the previous times. The Grantham Foundation, created three years ago, is one of those art centers where excellence most often meets. A caliber that makes it a place of international stature whose artistic residencies are coveted by creators and researchers from all continents.

The Quebec contemporary art community supports this organization founded by Bernard Landriault and Michel Paradis. During the opening ofReciprocity exercises, 160 contemporary art lovers were present in Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham, including artists, museum directors and curators, gallery owners and major collectors. A kind of impressive dubbing.

The exhibition designed by Ji-Yoon Han is a real intellectual pleasure. Powerful, well thought out (for one year), it addresses the challenge of our time, namely the ethics that we must embrace in order to respect a fair and equitable exchange between nature and us. We emerge from this reflection on a relevant and urgent reciprocity, with the desire that things change and that we commit ourselves to it personally.

Inspiration from the surrounding nature

The curator invited seven artists — more or less sensitive to environmental themes — to complete a one-week residency at the Foundation in order to draw inspiration from its bucolic green spaces. This gives a wide variety of works and mediums: installations, painting, photography, video, sculpture, drawing. All with respect for the Abenaki nation, guardian of the lands of Grantham, the commissioner having joined forces with anthropologist and museologist Nicole O’Bomsawin to better understand the notion of reciprocity.

We are welcomed at the exhibition site by Inscrutable Desires, by Jérôme Nadeau, ideally integrated into the architecture of the building designed by Pierre Thibault. An aesthetic dialogue and a kind of camouflage of the most beautiful effect. The perforated canvas print is formed of ethereal lines that meander and are both reminiscent of earthworm tunnels and “wormholes” which, in astrophysics, represent a shortcut through space-time. The work is made up of images found on the web, linked to all kinds of networks. The network, in essence both real and virtual reciprocity.

Near the bay window from which you can see Inscrutable Desires was installed the work of Katherine Melançon, Towards a parliament of the living III – Fougères. An installation that stems from the pleasure she had in discovering the ferns that proliferate locally. She created a parallel between these ferns in the woods and others planted in the room. With video screens that translate, in barely perceptible movements, the chemical life of the environment of ferns, this plant appeared on Earth at the same time as the first insects, 400 million years ago.

Next to it on a wall were pinned 125 aroma sleeves designed by Edmonton-based artist Christina Battle, who didn’t come to Grantham for a residency, because of the carbon footprint it would have created. His work is therefore a reflection on reciprocity at a distance. In the spring, she sent aniseed hyssop seeds from her region to the Foundation, which planted them. The fabric pockets are covered with instructions related to ecological actions and climate impacts or images of the territory between Edmonton and Quebec. They contain dried flowers that you can smell when you put your nose in them…

For his part, Montrealer Adam Basanta created in situ Window Mediation (Grantham), an installation that takes into account the relationship of intimacy between the Foundation building and the surrounding nature. Placed on a bay window, it is made up of pieces of computer screens on which are broadcast, in a loop, videos shot on site, and a live broadcast of the view of the wooded area.

Ontarian Mary Anne Barkhouse and Montrealer Cynthia Girard-Renard, well versed in environmental artistic practice, also brought nature into the building. With the suspension of cyanotypes of plants made on linen and cotton canvas, for the first time. And paintings, for the second, related to his interest in bats, threatened with extinction by the human species.

Finally, we leave the building to get some fresh air and discover the sound sculptures of the artist Ioana Vreme Moser, based in Berlin. Rings and necklaces surround tree trunks. “His work stems from studies done on the ability of trees to act as antennae,” says Ji-Yoon Han. Trees are sensitive to electromagnetic waves from our communication networks. The rings act as translational interfaces between the action of the tree as an antenna and its underground network. »

We are therefore supposed to hear small noises of crickets. But the work was silent on the day of our visit! This did not prevent us from communicating visually and olfactorily with the surrounding nature which was full of mushrooms and leaves in the colors of autumn…

Reciprocity exercisesat the Grantham Foundation, until 27 November.