Compared to its peers, the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides (MAC LAU) has nothing to be ashamed of. Of similar size to that of Montreal – the one installed at Place Ville-Marie –, enclosed like it in a multifunctional building, the Saint-Jérôme museum offers one of the key exhibitions of the summer.
Both intelligent and accessible, generous and moderate, Register of expertise draws on a variety of cases in order to highlight the determining role of the workshop. Without betting on flashiness or stars from abroad, the program salutes the exploratory and experimental nature of some fifteen artists “associated with the Laurentian territory”.
In sandstone, in textiles, in glass, in prints — regardless of the source — the path that leads to the work of art rarely takes a straight line. Before having the result in front of their eyes, the artists spend a lot of time working in the studio. Echoing this reality, the MAC LAU public must also first pass through this antechamber where everything is created.
The first room of the exhibition takes on the air of a collective workshop. Practices and eras rub shoulders there on tables and on the walls. Tools, notebooks, samples, documentation and a few works punctuate the space.
There are the ink pads of François Morelli, so essential to his drawings. By Dominique Pétrin, known for her screen-printed paper murals, the mosaic of small templates gives an idea of the composition she projects. And so, pell-mell, we have a glimpse of what is going on with each other, including Betty Goodwin, Claude Vermette and others who are no longer of this world.
Although indebted to the techniques and standards to his discipline, each artist is master of his art. Alain-Marie Tremblay’s research on concrete led him to “concrete”, a personal innovation that allowed him to be something other than just a ceramist. Exhibited on one of the windows, the report sent to him by a laboratory in 1987 reveals his quest for the most resistant white concrete.
Maude Bernier Chabot wrote down in a notebook the weight, in grams, of each color to be applied to the “bubble part” of her sculpture sleeping venus. “The “back” section must be done [sic] in two stages because of the steep drop,” she explains, at the end of what appears to be a homemade recipe.
Know-how is not a precise science. It consists of an accumulation of technical knowledge, traditional or artisanal, which differs from one creative head to another, from one pair of hands to another. This knowledge and this process are never identical from one workshop to another, but the artists do not work in a vacuum. Riopelle needed the expertise of Bonnie Baxter, whose Scarabée workshop, located in Val-David, is a renowned place in engraving. It was there, during the 1980s, that the master of owls printed his etchings.
Jean-Paul Mousseau, another artist from the Automatist movement, called on Mariette Rousseau-Vermette to create tapestries. The latter, who took root in Sainte-Adèle, with her husband, the ceramist Claude Vermette, is considered a pioneer of textile arts in Quebec. Skills register exhibits the boxes that Mousseau delivered to him, annotated with indications on his color choices. And in a bubble in the margin, he writes, in a wink that is both grateful and mocking: “Mariette / I tell you shit! / Good luck / Moss”.
Common points
In the second room, much larger, as it should be, since it hosts about fifty works, the exhibition takes place in a more usual form. There is no thematic division and the neighborhoods desired by the curatorial team are left to the public’s free interpretation. Sometimes, these are formal comparisons, like the one that brings together around the exploration of lines, colors, textures and volumes a tapestry by Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, a screen-printed paper by Dominique Pétrin, a blown glass assembly by Annie Cantin and a print by Bonnie Baxter.
The series of “vests”, prints and/or etchings by Betty Goodwin, and all nests, sculptures in silicone, fibers, feathers and other materials by Maude Bernier Chabot, share the same small space, as if these works had been made to rub shoulders. Here, it is the subject of the protective object that acts as a unifying point. It must be said that Goodwin also worked on the theme of the nest, several examples of which, including a “real” bird’s nest, are presented below.
Deceased in 2008, Betty Goodwin would have been 100 years old in 2023. Her gallery owner and friend, Roger Bellemare, pays homage to her in a short text exhibited in the first room, where he salutes “her incantatory practice”, carried by “dialogues of art with intuition”.
Although the museum nowhere explains the Montreal artist’s links with the Laurentians — this is one of the weaknesses of the exhibition, which wavers between pedagogy and pure poetry —, Skills register opens different doors. It gives voice to artists (or their relatives), whose voices can be heard from QR codes. The MAC LAU has also scheduled visits to real workshops. In August, Bonnie Baxter and Dominique Pétrin await the public. Reservations required.