maude-bc-lr-credit-jean-michael-seminaro

Maude Bernier Chabot, Vénus endormie (2022). Photo : Jean Michael Seminaro.

pièce contre pièce

Maude Bernier Chabot

Exhibition
Artist talk

An artist talk with Maude Bernier Chabot will take place on Saturday, October 29, 2022 at 3:00 pm in all three AXENÉO7's galleries.

The talk will be preceded by a final ascent of artist Josée Dubeau's Mirador, on the banks of the Ruisseau de la Brasserie.

Free entrance
Free parking

pièce contre pièce

MAUDE BERNIER CHABOT

 

The exhibition project pièce contre pièce appears as a figure of the indeterminate. The works which compose it convey the omnipresence of a troubled existence (multiple) the quality of which is to leave us battling with the  fact of having no other possibility but indecision. Consequently, the stake is physically challenging: that of perceiving the complexity of a body autopsied in both its sensitive and material dimension.

For Maude Bernier Chabot, the sculptural object arises from a mutation exercise. Favouring the technique of moulding for its ability to metamorphose one material into another, she endows the form with a new assemblage that blurs its identities—of nature, of gender. Putting the body—as sensing and affected flesh—at the center of this research, this selection of works produced over a decade opens onto this complex organ that is the skin—supporting, covering, protective, subjective, open, libidinal.

The uncertainty and uneasiness before some of its figurations move from representation towards a more tenuous evocation, something more ambiguous that always questions the presence of the body in regards to what it faces. The forms' appearance is stripped of any resemblance in order to move the rational experience towards the feeling body, confronted with a new physicality whose contours remain difficult to discern.

Vénus endormie is in this image the tainted portrait of a complex genre imbued with the feminine and masculine, comprised of pleasure and pain. To this representation, Nids brings a vaster bestiality via the gesture of bowing like an offering of fetishes laid before an altar of desires. At its opposite end, the twisted body of Vestibule becomes the immaculate relic of an unhoped-for promise whose fragility will make existence impossible. Souffles is the first trace of this obligatory mark that annihilates any idea of purity, an extraction that is difficult to envisage and which nevertheless draws enough strength from the plasticity of its memory to carry out its passage.

At the edges of these examples that punctuate pièce contre pièce, one encounters a deep reflection on matter as the skin of a porous relation between the inside and outside. These objects exist like intermediaries that are able to give material form to the twists and coils of combined identities.

— Jonathan Demers

Maude Bernier Chabot holds an BFA from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2009) and an MFA in sculpture from Concordia University (2015). She was awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Fellowship in 2012, the Yvonne Bombardier Award in 2015 and the Elizabeth Greenshields Award in 2016. She is the recipient of several grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Her work has been presented in 2022 at the artist-run centre Diagonale in Montréal, at the Musée d'art de Joliette (2018), at Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre in Sackville, New-Brunswick (2016), at L'Oeil de poisson in Quebec City (2016), at Circa (2016) and SKOL (2015) in Montréal and at the Yvonne Bombardier Gallery in Valcourt (2016). Maude Bernier Chabot lives and works in Val-Morin in the Laurentians.

The artist gratefully acknowledges support from Canada Council for the Arts.

Partners