What follows is a review of three different exhibitions. They are presented here because they have significant thematic/conceptual overlap and demonstrate different strategies of approach in a wide variety of media. Although the first and second approach the spectre of colonialism loosely, the last exploits it as its central feature.
Mathieu Gotti’s La grande Liquidation tout doit disparaître at Art Mûr
This is a repackaging of much the same work by Mathieu Gotti that was shown at the Centre d’art Jacques et Michel Auger in Victoriaville in 2021, although the scaling here is more confined. It involves a set of painted wood carvings, primarily of animals, but also of weaponry, gas cans etc. Carving marks are prominent and the paint application is crude if never garish. In general, they have the sense of inflated toys. Spread around the front of the gallery, they also give the impression of being more accumulated like a snow drift than thoughtfully placed.
If they are toyish, they do not seem quite cartoonish and this significantly detracts from the “dystopian” or satirical point that Gotti seems to be trying to make. Perhaps this is because, as the accompanying text oddly suggests, they are “phenomenological” which gets in the way of them being visually articulate, let alone in them becoming something as abstracted as “archetypes.”
On their own, they just feel jokey and would be at home as kitsch décor in the corner of a bar. There certainly is not enough to the way they are set up to establish the kind of meaning that he seems to freight them with. The text again:
His sculptures, through their narrative, take an incisive look at the extinction of species, overconsumption and climate change, among other things. They are staged with characteristic objects of human origin; the whole as a caricature of our civilization. [p] If read critically and politically, his works are open questions to the viewer about the short and long term consequences of our present lifestyles. The representation of hybridized animals makes the artist’s proposals accessible and thus allows him to initiate a reflection on politics and ecology among a wide audience.
However, there is no actual narrative on display. There is not even a narrative in the text, only a set of dogmatic claims that have no evidence in the work they reference. At most, what there might be is illustration, but it does not really function as that either because the object quality of the sculptures efficiently demeans their illustrative function.
Crystal Deer’s Masters Revised at Shé:kon Gallery
If Gotti attempted to use animal figures as a way of imagining civilizational dystopia, a technique that has a pretty long history in fables and satire, Crystal Deer also exploits animal figures for her set of utopian fantasies (which are also several years old). In marker and watercolour, she re-imagines a series of “Renaissance and Baroque masters.”
The rationale:
By replacing human figures in pre-existing Renaissance and Baroque paintings with animals, Crystal Deer reverses the roles of humans and animals. While keeping in mind the possible symbolism associated with animals, her final decision is an aesthetic one. They are selected for specific traits such as horns, antlers, wings, and talons that better reflect the idea of greatness and power. Deer pays tribute to the fauna with a great appreciation for their beauty, natural instincts and ability to exist without destroying their environment.
The marker images are much stronger. Those done in watercolour are attractive in that cheaply produced, excessively brightened coffee-table book way but are otherwise dull in their application. The effects are highly superficial, almost sketchy, the figures often appear just dropped in against backgrounds that seem on the verge of collapse, a suggestiveness that does not illustrate what the imagery is supposed to suggest at all. Perhaps the lack of technical mastery was the point, although there is no evidence for this level of strategy. Indeed, the lionization of the “idea of greatness and power” tends to suggest otherwise.
Nitakinan (Maison modèle), curated by Caroline Monnet and Sébastien Aubin at Centre Clark
Maison modèle is an annual event at Centre Clark. This is its fifth iteration. It is usually one of the centre’s more entertaining shows, filled with work heterogeneous enough that whatever limited “theme” might be implied by an appended text, it just ends up being absurd. This time around, enclosed under the title of Nitakinan and curated by Caroline Monnet and Sébastien Aubin, it is a lot more homogeneous and limited in scope, and far more restricted semiotically and formally, but still has some interesting cracks.
Commencing with an exclusive ticket-holder’s “VIP opening” that promised “the centre’s spaces transformed into a lush forest”, a menu created by Swaneige Bertrand, who specializes in Indigenous cuisine, an open bar, a musical performance by Jeremy Dutcher, a musical set from DJ Fermented Juice, and a tax receipt, the usually blocky set of walls and surprise corners were abandoned for something that felt much more open-planned with trees suspended upside-down from the ceiling.
If the effects of this are less lush than reminiscent of a dashboard air freshener tree, the ideological marketing for the event reads like a corporate PSA:
It is the land that raises us. Without it, we have no home and no food. It’s at the heart of our identity, it adapts to the cycle of the seasons. It’s the basis for our education, our growth, our dreams. It protects us, it is vast, inclusive. It’s a witness for our first loves. It is alive. We must protect the land, respect it, and love it. It doesn’t belong to us; we belong to it. The land is everyone’s house.For the fifth edition of Maison modèle, we wish to offer an anticolonial approach to the idea of the house. Going beyond the individuality often linked to private property, this year’s artistic directors wish to put forward the unconditional respect that we owe to the land, as a space that brings us together, that unites our past, our present and our common future.
It is a reminder of the role that each and every one of us has in the preservation and maintenance of this infinitely generous territory. By inviting the forest into CLARK, Nitakinan becomes a space to share, recollect and connect in a democratic and open way.
By virtue of being a group show, it does become the most complex of the three exhibitions. There are works in the show that do not sit easily with its general claims. Unless one excluded water from territory, Kleck’s Test by Naomi Cook for instance can be taken as a visceral celebration of the destruction (union by pollution) of the aquatic environment because, whatever its intentions, that is how it works as visual art. Arco (mmxxii) by Adam Basanta, a photo of a sculpture modelled on the Roman arch made from found objects in Italy likewise suggests a total indifference between the human and natural, a collapsing of historical difference into form, an indifference only accentuated by being a photo of a sculpture. To the extent that it semiotically suggests “going beyond” private property, it is in its affirmation of one of the primary forms of imperialist signs as a naturalized feature of the territory.
Perhaps the key work in the exhibition is actually Patrick Bérubé’s Domination. The catalogue hyperbolically describes it so:
Since the beginning of time, human beings are convinced that they occupy the centre of a planet, at the centre of the world; they see their environment environment as a mere stage set, convinced that they are the main actor. The work Domination embodies this ideology, according to which humans are masters and owners of the world, that humans are the masters and owners of nature. The oak leaf was generated automatically from a mathematical formula and the green background is reminiscent of a ‘green screen’ on which on which any setting could be reproduced.
Given the way in which the gallery space has been decked out in green, it is this “ideology” that is suggested to be at play, here expressed in a state-sponsored fantasy of the “infinitely generous territory.” When people put on exhibitions about the generosity of nature or the land, they do not talk about famine, or scurvy, depict tens of thousands dying from diarrhoea, or the “environmental destruction” caused by beavers, etc. It is a completely domesticated and muted nature that is imagined, devoid of any agency of its own, any alterity, just a sentimental reflection of an unhistorical fantasy of comfort. That is what Nitakinan amounts to.
Or, as an Ojibwa fire-keeper and conceptual artist once told me, “I’ve never heard anything stupider than the idea that a forest is more natural than an airport parking lot or cancer.” As already suggested, the artworks that overtly say much run against (or severely ironize) the curatorial statements and those that do not seem to say little relevant either way.
Ironically, what it put me in mind of was something co-written by one of Clark’s former directors, Roxanne Arsenault, in Kitsch QC. In one of the few places where the text lurches off into moral condemnation, the authors attack theme restaurants of the 1950s and on like Club Indien, the Indian Room or Motel le Totem for their “reductiveness,” a notion that has been significantly complicated by the better scholarship on the issue over the past three decades. It is, however, an even cruder (and sincere) form of this reductiveness that is curatorially deployed here, branded with the disciplinary patter of Liberal governance (openness, inclusivity, love etc).