Casa Project | Of wax, paper and bone

Relations between man and his environment. The influence of art to change our way of seeing the world. The exhibition Echo-System / Matter and mutations curator Dominique Bouffard addresses these themes in the rooms of Projet Casa, in Montreal, with organic creations by artists Claude Bourque, Stéphanie Morissette and Sebastian Maltais. Works of wax, paper and bone …

Eric Clement
Press

The former gallery owner Dominique Bouffard returned to live and work most of the year in the Magdalen Islands, where she is from. She continues to promote the visual arts and artists whose vision she shares. During the summer of 2020, on the Islands, she met Danielle Lysaught and Paul Hamelin, the collectors who founded the Projet Casa art venue, near Jeanne-Mance Park. She offered them an exhibition with the artists Stéphanie Morissette, Claude Bourque and Sebastian Maltais on the idea of ​​mutation.

Claude bourque

Claude Bourque had never exhibited in Montreal. The 57-year-old sculptor is known as the white (sea) wolf in the Islands. Co-founder of the Sandcastle Competition in Havre-Aubert, which is in its 35th anniversary^e edition, he gained a fine reputation by creating contemporary sculptures made of whalebone and copper.

Laureate of the CALQ prize in 2015, hunter, fisherman and sculptor, Claude Bourque has been collecting whale bones washed up on beaches for many moons. Being Madelinot, marine mammals are part of his culture. He is interested in their diversity, their role in the global food chain, their vulnerability due to global warming. To carve a whale vertebra recovered from the beach, he has to wait up to seven years, he says, as there are so many procedures to be performed to remove the fat it contains and dry it.

“I put the bones in big bins and the flies go in there,” he says. They will lay eggs. The eggs will hatch and give rise to millions of maggots whose urine contains ammonia which kills the fat. Afterwards, we pressure wash the bones, put them in the sun, and put them back in the water. It takes years. ”

Sebastian maltais

We had already seen the encaustic works of Sebastian Maltais a few years ago. He has lost none of his talent for this difficult to master medium. Layers and coats of wax that give soft and elegant effects for portraits on canvas. At Projet Casa, he mainly exhibits a large work in black and white – 2.44 m by 3.25 m -, Hunting game, a forest staging made with models, including several of his friends from the Islands. Shifty-looking characters who seem to have their own interests. At no time does one have the impression of witnessing a reunion of hunting friends.

“As with the theme of the exhibition, it talks about how human beings interact with those around them, but also how they modify their environment and make it their own,” says Sebastian Maltais. At the same time, I wanted not to make a contemporary painting, more a work without an era. »A work that also evokes biological diversity. The importance of controlled hunting to promote a balance between species from the same biotope. Unlike what we see in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where the disappearance of the seal hunt and overfishing have created an imbalance and a decline in cod stocks, argues Claude Bourque.

Stephanie Morissette

Stéphanie Morissette also addresses the theme of wildlife diversity and environmental integrity. Always with that sharp look that is both playful and critical. The artist even used Projet Casa’s beautiful indoor fountain to graft his paper feathers, gold leaf and styrofoam to it to create his installation. Nest in the gap.

Beyond her weird installations made of paper bird feathers, she added, this time around, the theme of drones. As if, in the distant future, birds and drones would become one… in a changing nature. Even depicting insects in the shape of a drone in a frame, as if it were an entomological collection.

“I have worked a lot in recent years on this idea of ​​mutation, of links between biology and technology,” says the 44-year-old artist from Sherbrooke. Between the living and the non-living. How these technological objects could one day interact with the animals of the future… ”

Echo-System / Materials and mutations, until November 6, at Projet Casa.