As of February 24, the artist-run center Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer is presenting an exhibition that traces the effect of climate change on the ice of the river, thus following in the footsteps of other places where the eastern Quebec who give a special place to environmental issues in their programming. Portrait of an unfolding trend.
In Carleton-sur-Mer, Robin Servant and Joan Sullivan immerse the public under the river pack ice which is shrinking winter after winter. These Bas-Saint-Laurent artists are sensitive to the already visible effects of climate change on their part of the country. They invite us to slow down, in their installation exhibition, to listen to the voice of the mirrors and hear what it has to say to us.
Robin Servant is a sound artist who practices ” field recording », or the sound capture of environments. He recently discovered, through the use of hydrophones, a new world of auditory textures that can reveal the life that moves in aquatic ecosystems. In The voice of ice cream, he is interested in what happens under this thick layer of frost – his artistic approach coming up against the effects of the climate crisis on the coast. “This is the first time in 20 years that the fishing huts have been installed in February and not in January [entre Le Bic et Rimouski]. Luckily I did my sound recordings last year, because that would have complicated things. This year, there was simply no sea ice until three or four days ago,” explains the multidisciplinary artist.
“Are we blind to these changes? This is the question that Joan Sullivan asks herself and which leads her to think about her photographic project differently. For the exhibition, the artist collaborated with Engramme, a center specializing in printmaking, to emboss his photographs in Braille, thus superimposing excerpts from the IPCC reports on his abstract images. His work is made up of about twenty photos whose arrangement, in the distribution space, recalls floating icebergs. Each image, suspended, is made accessible to blind people as well as to people of various sizes – a way of accounting for the universality of this crisis. “I want people to dive in, to embody the disappearing ice. […] This is not a standard exhibition; I wanted to create an atmosphere with Robin’s audios, to offer people the experience of being on the ice, in the waves. »
Without being a whistleblower or activist, the project takes advantage of shocking scientific facts handled with sensitivity by the artists, a way for them to manage to touch first, and then to raise awareness. The exhibition offers a multisensory experience and is part of a broader social dialogue that affects the local and international community.
A growing trend
Many arts venues in Eastern Quebec are focusing more and more on environmental issues in their programming. They thus testify to the omnipresence of these questions within the artistic community.
Recent projects like Tryphon. A St. Lawrence sperm whale (Cynthia G. Renard, Rimouski Regional Museum), Water stories (Isabelle Hayeur, Bas-Saint-Laurent Museum, in Rivière-du-Loup) and Ecosystem(s) (Andrée Bélanger, Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent) represent the range of proposals that relate to this desire to show the impact of humans on their territory.
The director of the Reford Gardens International Garden Festival, Ève De Garie-Lamanque, and the general and artistic director of the Caravansérail artists’ centre, Philippe Dumaine, mention an element specific to the regions of the Saint- Laurent: Many opportunities for collaboration with scientists arise for artists, due to the high concentration of university programs in life sciences and marine sciences in the region. Mme De Garie-Lamanque, curator of the exhibition Tryphon, rightly relates that the artist Cynthia G. Renard had access to data from the Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals (GREMM) for this project, which enabled her to trace the epic of this sperm whale which was stranded, entangled in fishing lines, on Île Saint-Barnabé, near Rimouski. “The issue of science is very much alive in the East; to put forward proposals that deal with the environment also contributes to a better dissemination of artistic projects, because they arouse the interest of a wider public”, says the one who was curator of the Regional Museum of Rimouski during 10 years.
Véronique Drouin, co-director of the Center d’art de Kamouraska and member of the board of directors of the Société des musées du Québec, believes that the desire to include these issues is visible in programming, but also in museum practices, which tend to be reassessed in terms of their environmental impacts. “Even in our governance and in our choices, climate issues are central. […] You have to be part of the discourse: the projects that you present and what emanates from them are important. It’s a choice of artistic direction, but also a choice of values,” she says.
Oriane Asselin Van Coppenolle, curator at the Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent, agrees. The latter observes that “museums are very porous to current issues; [qu’]there is an acceptance of no longer trying to be neutral, to take a stand”. Like Philippe Dumaine, they observe that their recent exhibitions tend to make people reconnect with the beauty of nature to propose new ways of inhabiting and protecting it. This is an omnipresent motif, especially among emerging artists, in the files received that allow them to shape their programming.
Echoes elsewhere
Besides the exhibition The voice of ice cream, two other projects capture attention. The Musée de la Gaspésie highlights the corpus Peninsula by the artist Michel Huneault. His thirty photographs are as many recordings of the Bas-Laurentian and Gaspé shores where, equipped with a laser level, he marked with (iron) red the horizon of the places which will be swallowed up by the rising waters when the Earth warms up. 2 to 4°C. At the Rimouski Regional Museum, the traveling exhibition masters of the world arefolks, by Clément de Gaulejac, offers a different reflection: it is the much more political side of the climate crisis that is put forward. The artist has created a large tapestry where these “masters” sail from island to island, from yacht to yacht. He thus summons the idea of the “end of the world” and asks why that of the Earth will arrive before that of capitalism, noting a global and systemic inaction and depicting it playfully.
The universality of these reflections is indeed the driving force that makes them so popular in programs in eastern Quebec and elsewhere: the artists turn, out of necessity, to these issues to think about the future, even going so far as to modify the materials and techniques they use in order to better reflect their environmental values and the footprint that their practices leave on the planet.