Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre

Authors: Elise Anne LaPlante, Mimi Haddam

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

Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre encompasses three exhibitions that invited us to reflect on ways of seeing the body that challenge its normative boundaries. Exploring the possibilities of metamorphosis, the three iterations of the project were presented successively at La Maison des artistes visuels francophones (Saint-Boniface, Manitoba), Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen (Université de Moncton, New Brunswick), and Galerie de l’UQAM (Montréal, Québec) and each include new articulations of the works and the relationships between them.

Here, the exhibition Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre takes print form, gathering poetic threads and weaving them into a hybrid collection. The book’s three chapters resonate off a text co-written by curator and writer Elise Anne LaPlante and writer and artist Mimi Haddam. The texts in two languages are interlaced with illustrated documentation of Caroline Boileau and Helena Martin Franco’s performances during each of the project’s cycles, seen through the gaze of Chase Martin (Saint-Boniface), Natalie Morin (Moncton) and Julie Delporte (Montréal). The book also contains works by Caroline Boileau, Daze Jefferies, Dominique Rey, Helena Martin Franco, Ikumagialiit, and Winnie Truong. The words of Caroline Boileau, Daze Jefferies, an elephant woman (Helena Martin Franco), and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory (Ikumagialiit) serve as interludes that tie the three chapters together, their voices harmonizing with the echoes of their unique imaginaries.