“There is a place where the seeds all grow in a heap where everything is high”, sing Les Trois Accords in their anthem St-Bruno. Away from Highway 20 where the group La Fantasie originated, the small municipality, south of Montreal, remains far from the spotlight despite the attraction of the Vieux Presbytère exhibition center and its sure offer in visual arts. The current exhibitions of Eveline Boulva and Andrée-Anne Dupuis Bourret fit perfectly into this historic field stone setting, which invites you to meditate on the passage of time.
Densify time
Upstairs, Andrée-Anne Dupuis Bourret stands out for the maddening accumulations that she declines in three installations made of poor materials. In the masterpiece, Attempts and abandonments (collection) (2018-2021), the soft colors that beautifully adorn the multitude of found objects, the recovered materials and the workshop prototypes make us forget their wear and their modesty. A professor of visual arts at UQAM, the artist has even integrated the residues of student work.
Gathered together in a whole, these material explorations value rejections, see their necessity in each of the gestures. Profuse and organized, the device can be compared to a candy counter, which offers an abundance in itself that is pleasant to look at, a field of possibilities. Since the Maison de la culture Mercier where it was presented for the first time, in 2021, the work is gaining in scope here, thanks to a warmer and more domestic setting.
The house is the context of reference evoked by the artist in this haunted exhibition, like many, by the pandemic confinements that the other two works point to. The news can be read implicitly in the newspapers, copies of the To have to in this case, piled up, tinted and cut to perfection, according to a play on printed surfaces dear to the artist. Between mourning and resistance, cultivated rosemary plants open up a new direction in the work of Dupuis Bourret, where patience of gesture remains essential.
Eveline Boulva and the landscape
As the traveler that she is, Eveline Boulva continues to scrutinize the landscapes she has traveled through in images. She brings together here two corpuses resulting from stays away from home, one in Belize and the other in Newfoundland. From photos and representations of a scientific nature, she translates in watercolor and graphite territories in transformation.
Around the Caribbean Sea, in Central America, the impacts of climate change are more evident, suggest the works of the artist from Quebec in the first series, which shows motifs of palm trees and mangroves. Storms, hurricanes and erosion await these pieces of nature far from the attractive postcards.
Tourists go to Newfoundland to catch a glimpse of drifting icebergs in the spring. Their number would fluctuate with global warming. This is perhaps why Boulva magnifies the observation with two graphite drawings which, as in all of his works, are striking in their extreme precision. A grid structure forms a system, marking the time that has passed on these very old heaps of ice. The attentive “doing” of the artist retains them in a way. Unless, already, they are more than mirages.
Photo and cinema in Longueuil
The theme of time is also present with Michel Lamothe and Bertrand Carrière, who share the picture rails at the Maison de la culture in Longueuil. These two pillars of photography in Quebec — whose work is respectively the subject of substantial studies, under the pen of Pierre Rannou among others, in monographs published by Plein Sud and Expression, center d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe — have another acquaintance to cultivate ties with the cinema.
The first is a filmmaker, but he devotes himself as much to photography. In the recent works he presents here, digital prints from silver prints, he is interested in familiar or visited environments. The black and white, the jitters and the obvious grain give the scenes a pregnant mystery. A pier (a nod to Chris Marker), a marina with its almost obliterated boats and views of cemeteries give pride of place to ghosts.
He also author of films in his spare time, photographer on set and collaborator among others of the review 24 picturesBertrand Carrière has frankly intertwined photography and cinema, as evidenced by the corpus presented. The time-images (1997-2000) were produced using a 16mm motion picture camera. The silver prints, photograms, isolate moments, preserve traces of movement in strongly atmospheric scenes with an autobiographical flavor.
Others brilliantly pay homage, such as inkjet printing The running horse (2018), in reference to Muybridge who, with his chrono-photography, paved the way for the avant-gardes of the early 20th centuryand century, concerned with evoking movement in the fixed image. Career suspends time also in the series Images-black (2018). By creating climaxes on appropriate excerpts from American noir films of the past, he exacerbates their visual codes while liquidating history. The dramatic tension remains at its peak.
To Roberto Pellegrinuzzi the Lake Route