Stepping into Sylvia Safdie’s studio is like stepping into a cabinet of curiosities that is full of artifacts and rare, carefully preserved specimens. Heterogeneous collections of minerals and plants densely inhabit the shelves. On the ground, other elements rest, arranged in a grid, rocks that look like heads and pairs of feet. For little, one would say they are animated with life.
“Over the years, I have brought these things that fascinate me,” says the seasoned artist behind these sets that she organizes in installations. They will be the subject of an exhibition at the Darling Foundry, As I Walk, pretext for our meeting at the end of September, a few days before the cashing for the transport of the works.
For this purpose, she fixed the compositions. “It’s not always like that. The shelves are always in transformation, in change. The relationship of things to each other is very important. If the choice to link such and such an element with another is crucial, it was first necessary for the artist to locate each of them in nature, often in the Eastern Townships or elsewhere in the world. of his many trips. “Look at this one, it looks like a sculpture. It’s amazing ! It looks like Balzac’s head [œuvre de Rodin]. You have to want to see it, otherwise it is possible to miss it and not see anything. “
Rooting
For a long time, the workshop has been the repository of this keen attention to the world for Safdie. “I would never have been able to do this if I hadn’t had a workshop like this. It’s a very important part of my life, ”says the 78-year-old woman, moved. Her art has been taking shape in symbiosis with this vast industrial space for nearly 45 years, an adventure shared with her spouse, artist John Heward, who died in 2018.
In retrospect, she sees a therapeutic dimension to her art that she could have done away from outside eyes. “I never saw myself in the myth of the artist. I saw myself rather involved in a process. I needed it to survive, to have my own language. “
Born in Lebanon, Safdie grew up in Israel before immigrating to Montreal in 1953. She had to mourn her homeland of which she still has childhood memories, such as the lush garden of the family home. “I spent a lot of time collecting things, fragments of nature […]. There was a little cave where I put them in order and rearranged them. No one was aware of this private world, of my communion with nature. “
These collections of yesteryear have today become inventories that are as much inspired as they are studied. To the “heads” and “feet” – rocks among which sometimes slip bronze or glass copies – are added “tools”, other rudimentary assemblages. Like tools, precisely, or an invented alphabet, they suggest their use.
Reconnecting with collections has allowed him to make Quebec his new home, and to leave part of it in the Mediterranean. “It is impossible to recover [le passé], but it is possible to do something else, ”she says with a thought for the current immigrants who are going through such a process of uprooting and reconstruction.
Body to body
In addition to the collections, cardinal in the eyes of the artist given the place they occupy in his approach, the studio abounds in other works. Many of them have already found takers, in important museum institutions among others, but Sylvia Safdie is a prolific artist who works in series, continuously accumulating works, out of necessity.
So there are drawings and paintings, which present schematic figures, human or plant, on long vertical supports, without frame, suspended by hangers which give them the air of floating bodies. The vertigo of their tireless repetition is transposed in a few handwritten notes on one of the columns of the piece, a makeshift register apparently still in progress.
Their tone is made up of browns and ochres, the colors of the earth that the artist has mixed with oil. These pigments, she has made a collection of up to 500 samples, taken from all over the planet, starting with the Sinai desert. Earth, rock and plants express its imperative need for contact with matter. “I became interested in how we are formed by nature and how the body is part of it,” she explains, vigorously manipulating one of her “tools”. In echo, among the artifacts gleaned from the shelves on the wall, are sculptures in glass, cast iron and bronze, hands, his, powerful.
In time, she had to give up this decisive melee with the material that was endangering her health. She no longer paints or collects items. “What I collect now are videos. I film water in motion and the camera does not move ”, explains the one who, from 2001, reinvented herself with the image. “The video made me look differently. I have come to observe time and process. It was an extension of what I was doing here [dans l’atelier]. “
Uncertain future
Once out of the studio for the exhibition, the collections may not return. At her age, Sylvia Safdie regretfully thinks of having to get rid of it, like the studio itself that she will one day have to leave, a painful step. This place is an intrinsic part of his works, it is his history, the result of his actions. The three-story industrial building also encapsulates the memory of her romantic, domestic and artistic life with John Heward. Everything reminds him of his loved one, while his absence is sorely felt.
“Our work was very different and despite that there was a dialogue. The two were nourished by the industrial environment of the sector, Griffintown, deserted at the turn of the 1980s, revitalized by their presence. She drew materials there, called on manufacturing services. She notices with dismay that things have changed a lot as her property is surrounded by a ferocious building site of condo towers where trees and the human scale no longer have their place. Unless this building is transformed into a cultural center, an idea she suggests half-heartedly, what will remain of this rich page of history?