The team at the Musée d’art de Joliette seems to have had a lot of fun with the rich theme of time, interested in the ways in which we take charge of the past and choose to chart the future, a theme that had been emerging for some time for its summer exhibitions. This is because some of them, scheduled for a long time, constituted a preliminary foundation that could have dampened the thematic ardor of the curators if they had not tried to see the points of connection. Working together, the departments of collections conservation and contemporary art conservation were able to find in these proposals a lever pushing them to graft final and judicious exhibitions to this general framework on times past, present and future. A look at the current activities of a teeming, dynamic and relevant art venue.
Women’s Commissariats and Convergences in the Plural
The exhibitions Futures (Rajni Perera), The legacy of the remains, END (Mark Lewis) and Marcelle Ferron. The sum of freedom punctuate the museum, which since its renovation in 2015 has offered more generous tours with its large rooms. These proposals, led by three women, two of whom work at the museum, resonate with each other. Articulating narratives anchored both in contemporary art and in the broader panorama of art history, they tell us about the state of the world today and then, in its temporal complexities and complex temporalities.
Circulated by the McMichael Collection, Rajni Perera’s exhibition is one of the summer’s key presentations. Curated by Sarah Milroy, it reveals a future that does not deny the past, but rather embraces all its nuances, drawing on a charged cultural imagination to explore the types of adaptations our bodies are already undergoing in a present of multiple crises. The Sri Lankan-born artist addresses the issues of climate migration by staging “travelers” prepared for great crossings. Her sculptures and paintings highlight bodies of color dressed in flamboyant costumes and hybridized humans who seem to be mutating, extreme conditions having forced their transformation over time. Without detour, the proposition is political and necessary: it shows the underside of what already exists, but which is prey to collective denial.
The curator of contemporary art Marianne Cloutier, who also added a few works by Perera to the proposal initially put together by Milroy, and the curator of collections Julie Alary Lavallée have added their voice: one of them is responsible for curating the exhibition. END and, for the other, the exhibition curatorship The legacy of the remains And Marcelle Ferron. The sum of freedom. The titles evoke this energy of time omnipresent in the programming: Lewis’s end contrasts with Perera’s futures by offering minimal narratives that speak of obsolescence, waiting and evanescence, then The legacy of the remains embraces the monumental, like the collection of Ferron’s paintings, observing history in the making.
A Look at Collecting at MAJ
The legacy of the remains was shaped as the team, forced to do so by the renovation work then underway at the museum, took out imposing works from the institution’s reserves. This vast inventory allowed Julie Alary Lavallée to identify an impressive number of works that had a relationship with a certain rereading of history. While some older pieces demonstrate a desire to reproduce reality, more recent projects show signs of a critical reflection on the monument and the anti-monument.
The proposals also reread the path of sculpture over the last decades. In addition to the wide variety of materials involved, we detect fruitful dialogues between the eras in the works of Jocelyne Alloucherie, David Altmejd, Pierre Ayot, Carl Beam, Gabriel Brun-Buisson, Pierre Gauvreau, Alfred Laliberté, Ernst Neumann, Alice Nolin, Royden Rabinowitch, Morton Rosengarten, Karen Elaine Spencer and Bill Vazan. The vast range of works testifies to a fine research work to create sometimes aesthetic, sometimes conceptual connivances between the pieces.
But the curator’s proposal is not just about that: as with the exhibition on Ferron that she also put together, Julie Alary Lavallée sought to take a new look at collecting itself. In The legacy of the remainsit is a work by Karen Elaine Spencer that captures attention. It constitutes one of the first performances acquired in the history of the institution, an important step for the MAJ collection, but also for this discipline derived from living art, whose collecting is relatively recent in the history of art.
In the same spirit, the curator cites in the labels the provenance of each of Ferron’s works presented in the exhibition bearing her name. The Museum, which has almost never acquired works from its collection through purchase, nevertheless has many of the artist’s paintings, including one purchased (showing Ferron’s importance in its eyes) and others received from donors. By highlighting this particularity, Alary Lavallée makes a commentary on the very act of collecting. Moreover, the exhibition restores Ferron in his position as an artist, but also in history — sociopolitical, artistic, cultural —, another way of looking at the continuum of time.
Past and present, hand in hand
What emanates from the MAJ’s summer programming is this connection between the institution’s expertise concerning the conservation of contemporary art and the management of collections. Alary Lavallée and Cloutier, supported by Milroy, work together to create a strong proposition that multiplies the winks and narrative games. The proposed plot knows very well how to make the many temporal back-and-forths that it advances, taking charge of the diversions and circumventions of the canons of history to propose a future not vulnerable, but powerful, whose imaginations have adapted over time.