Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre

Exhibition organized by La Maison des artistes visuels francophones, Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen and Galerie de l’UQAM

Curator: Elise Anne LaPlante

Artists: Caroline Boileau, Mimi Haddam, Daze Jefferies, Ikumagialiit, Helena Martin Franco, Dominique Rey, Winnie Truong

November 3, 2023 - January 20, 2024

Opening: November 2, 2023, 5:30 pm

Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre concludes its Canadian tour at Galerie de l’UQAM after being presented successively at Maison des artistes visuels francophones (Saint-Boniface, Manitoba) and Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen (Université de Moncton, New Brunswick), each iteration including new articulations of the works and the relationships between them. Curated by UQAM graduate Elise Anne LaPlante, the exhibition focuses on the concept of the mutating body as an act of self-definition and emancipation as it unfolds in the practices of feminist and queer artists.

The exhibition

To perceive the different textures of the body is to open oneself to perspectives and experiences untainted by the mechanisms of domination and the primacy of reason, be it in an elephant-woman, or in the affect of body hair. This type of perception privileges somatic and sensory forms of knowledge. It stems, at least sometimes, from simply trusting oneself. Other times, it poses a challenge to our usual ways of thinking and of understanding reality. It is in this spirit that curator Elise Anne LaPlante invites us to partake in the works and words that come together in Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre [the seventh petal of the tulip creature].

How does normativity and its many forms control our bodies? How might an exploration of the body’s imaginary uncover the potential contained in the tension between different transitional and circulatory states? Faced with these questions, we thus cannot deny ourselves women’s poetry, the fertile meanderings and connections of monstrous imaginaries far too long muffled. For they are essential to the free movement of breath between the skin and the organs, without and within, essential to the resolution of those tensions lodged deep in the archive of our bodies.

Concluding its journey in Montréal, this three-part exhibition project presents practices that make room for hybrid, ambiguous bodies, or that explore different possibilities through metamorphosis.

About the artists

Working from a feminist ethos, with a particular interest in health, be it private, public, social or political, Caroline Boileau creates often-hybrid artworks within a multidisciplinary practice encompassing installation, drawing, video, and performance. The hybrid body and the many representations of the body, particularly the female body, are recurrent themes in her research informed by art history, medical history, science and current events. Through a practice of dialogue with place, collections, objects, communities and people, her work seeks to uncover improbable cohabitations by catalyzing poetical and political transformation of shared spaces.
carolineboileau.com

Mimi Haddam questions both the relationship between form and matter, and the porosity between the body and its environments. In her commitment to reclaiming one’s own legitimacy through body- and affect-informed writing, Mimi Haddam testifies to the power of action and transformation of sense-based experience on private and collective identities. Her projects seek out sensitive movements and invest in uncertain and porous spaces. Mimi Haddam is the author of Attendez de m’enterrer pour chanter (Le Noroît, 2023), Petite brindille de catastrophes (Éditions de la Tournure, 2017, expanded edition 2019), C’EST (Éditions Omri, 2018) and Il existe un palais de teintes et d’hyperboles (Édition Omri, 2018).
mimihaddam.com

Ikumagialiit ᐃᑯᒪᒋᐊᓖᑦ (“those that need fire”) is a quartet performance art band with Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Cris Derksen, Jamie Griffiths and Christine Tootoo. A dynamic group of feminists, Ikumagialiit is femme, butch, shaved, braided, music, light, voice and action; a combination of unique talents and life perspectives that are enigmatic and provocative. Turning towards the question of how to hold space for fear when pressure is mounting, Ikumagialiit takes on the metaphor of the bowhead whale, learning how to breathe in the depths and exploring Inuit practices of meditation and spiritual skill-building to make this journey.
ikumagialiit.com

Daze Jefferies is a white settler artist, writer, and educator born and raised in the Bay of Exploits on the northeast coast of rural Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). Working with archives, beach wash-up, queer ephemera, oral histories, sound, poetry, sculpture, theory, performance, and illustration, her research-based creative practice engages with ocean as a body becoming to form washy, wayward, and withheld counter-histories of queer, trans, and sex worker worlds at the water’s edge. What emerges from this speculative assemblage is a story of touch, drift, and transition that finds hope in the changing North Atlantic.
dazejefferies.com

In her transdisciplinary practice, Helena Martin Franco explores the hybridization of many artistic approaches, traditional techniques, and new technologies. Helena creates autofictions that examine the porous boundaries between cultural, national, and gendered identities. Her projects speak to dialogue around sexist violence, immigration, and artistic censorship. In a feminist perspective, she forms ties between collectives and cultural organizations with the goal of encouraging encounters and exchanges between artistic practices, notably between Canada and Colombia. Helena was born in Colombia and has lived and worked in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal since 1998.
helenamartinfranco.com

Dominique Rey is a multidisciplinary artist whose recent work explores the ambiguous relationship between mother and child. She is specifically interested in unraveling the myriad transformations of early motherhood and the relentless balance/imbalance that is at stake. These performative images explore notions of presence and absence, attachment and desire, blurring the corporeal and psychic edges that link mother and child.
dominiquerey.com

Winnie Truong is a Toronto artist working with drawing and collage to explore ideas of identity, feminism, and fantasy along with a digital art and animation practice that includes public art and community engagement. Her work provides the imaginary viewpoint of a feminist naturalist from another realm, one who undertakes their labour with great detail and care to depict the part- flora, part-creature figures by observing them in their natural environments devoid of the male presence or familiar social or biological guidelines. As these unashamed subjects shun the viewer’s gaze; they are given their own notions of agency, beauty, sensuality and purpose. These figures are seen contorted, frolicking, consuming, nurturing, conquering, and entangled in environments where you are unsure where limb ends and leaf begins.
winnietruong.com

About the curator

Elise Anne LaPlante is an independent curator, author, and cultural worker. She flourishes in the grey areas, intrigued and driven by the political possibilities of the poetic. Elise Anne explores affect and imaginaries while remaining acutely attentive to the dehierarchization of knowledge. Some of her recent exhibitions include Le murmure d’une empreinte (Arprim, Montréal, 2022, with Caroline Mauxion and Céline Huyghebaert), and Cultiver l’humilité | M8jagen piwihozw8gan (7th ORANGE triennial, Saint-Hyacinthe, 2022, with co-curator Véronique Leblanc). Her words have appeared in various publications and gallery texts, and in the magazines esse arts + opinions, Espace art actuel, and Vie des arts. Elise Anne holds an MA in art history and feminist studies from UQAM, and strives to develop and shape her thinking through writing and curating in a spirit of careful reconciliation between theory and practice. As an Acadienne currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, her thought often travels between different spaces and times.
eliseannelaplante.com

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