Marie-France Brière : La pression austéritaire (Austerity pressure)

Sculpture

March 10th — April 16th, 2022

Opening event March 10th, 2022 — 5:30 pm

Curator: Milan Bernard

The material universe in all its extent lies at the heart of Marie-France Brière’s work. Favouring stone as a medium, her work revolves around pairings with other materials having opposite qualities (suppleness, fragility, softness) and/or with symbolic elements (objects, photographs, texts, sounds) often foreign to stone’s semantic vista.

For some of the works presented in this exhibition, Brière used blocks of Carrara marble brought back after an extended stay in Italy in the early 1980s. Long-known for its artistic vocation, the Carrara region is now increasingly under pressure from massive industrial extraction of this non-renewable resource.

The artist broached the material as if it were inhabited by this history and new reality. Thus rendered, it articulates a political reading of the exhibition, opening up avenues of reflection on the ideological effects of austerity on the production and on creative work, and vice-versa.

Bearing this layer of meaning in its very materiality, La pression austéritaire explores the identity of the materials, their capacity for transformation, for dissimulation, and for revelation.

The artist would like to thank Claude Bernard, Simon Rancourt and  Simon Lachapelle for their precious collaboration.

 

Photo Credit: Guy L’Heureux