An exhibition born from a gesture of friendship: this is what the unique proposal of Dirt, currently presented at the Occurrence gallery. The artist Pierre Bourgault, who received the Paul-Émile Borduas Prize in 2020 and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2022, is accompanied by four acolytes with whom he has maintained a close collaboration. Together, they are here both artists and curators. By meeting their gazes, they articulate a project where conversation and complicity are salient.
An introspective rather than retrospective approach
The invitation from Lili Michaud, director of Occurrence, extended to Pierre Bourgault, is at the origin of a sensitive and intelligent exhibition. Recently, the gallery has innovated with programming that gives artists who have marked the history of space a second opportunity to exhibit, thus creating continuity with the past. This proposal constitutes a spark plug for the artist: initially unsure of wanting to immerse himself in a carte blanche project like this, he ends up giving in and embracing a five-person creative process.
The exhibition comes together slowly, following the tides and discussions between fellow artists who, for the most part, come to life in Pierre’s studio in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli. “It all happened very organically, by force of circumstances. There was talk that Anne-Marie [Proulx] and I are in the game, and Pierre [Bourgault] always talked about Marie-Ève again [Charron] and Gwenaël [Bélanger]of their parallel project…”, launches the author Gentiane La France.
Near the river, Pierre Bourgault’s creative space is a place for sometimes fortuitous, sometimes organized encounters. If there are not often all five of them there, they pass in turn, naturally shaping the project around poetry and territory, questions that link them all. “All these back and forths between the workshop and the territory nourish Pierre’s work, but also his life. […] This is what is fascinating about Pierre: he is known for his works, but also for who he is,” explain together Anne-Marie Proulx and Gentiane La France, who offer, in the first room of the exhibition, a look at an entire life spent among natural elements. The Ansillon of the artist sits in space. Grandiose, the immersive sculpture halfway between the boat and the passenger compartment invites the public to sail there for a while, carried by the images of Proulx which seem to disperse a wind from the river, revealing not far away the journeys of Bourgault’s navigational epics . The words of La France tie the whole thing together: “The body, sucked in, penetrates with the wind and embeds itself in the solitary steerage […]. Skimming the horizons, it makes sails and hearts swell. »
The installation creates a passage leading to the second room of the exhibition, where Gwenaël Bélanger and Marie-Ève Charron meet Pierre in another light. The project had already been on track for some time: it highlights the artist’s embroidered working dogs which, buried under other works, once captured the attention of Marie-Ève Charron at the workshop . Gwenaël Bélanger, then in residence at Est-Nord-Est, a place of creative emulsion founded by Pierre Bourgault in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, came to photograph them, while they were worn by the artist. At Occurrence, this series resurfaces, accompanied by texts by Marie-Ève Charron, which paint a clear portrait of the multiple postures adopted by Bourgault in his practice. At the border of social criticism and poetry, the female dogs display extracts from the artist’s work. They appear, stacked, alongside a selection of miniatures from the Port-Joli tradition of wood sculpture, straight out of the Bourgault collection. Contemporary art and crafts intersect and reveal the importance, for the artist, of showing “all these valuable things that are done in [s]we corner country”, while emphasizing the elements of rupture which exist between these and his work.
Humility in creation
The project aims to meet the concentric layers which nourish Pierre Bourgault’s figure as an artist-navigator. The horizontal collaboration of the five, however, reinvents the usual way of designing and producing an exhibition. “I think we wanted to focus our attention on Pierre’s practice, but also to provoke something in our own practices, to do something unusual and to redefine roles by diving into a new generosity. », suggests Gwenaël Bélanger.
Bourgault adds: “It talks about the sea, it talks about critiques, it talks about concepts; These things don’t have the same meaning when put together like that. Each person has had a theoretical impact on what is proposed. It talks about my life, my work, but I persisted, I didn’t want it to be just me, I wanted us to see the impact of sharing in the exhibition. » The bond of affection between the collaborators allowed an atmosphere of co-creation. The result is a strong and introspective exhibition, nourished by poetry and a meshing of each person’s universe.