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Marie-France Brière : La pression austéritaire (Austerity pressure)
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
Marie-France Brière is a multidisciplinary artist born in Montreal in 1957. In the 1980s, she studied at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she obtained a master’s degree in visual arts. During this period, she also lived and worked in Pietrasanta, Italy, where she perfected the techniques of sculpture in stone, a material which has held a central place throughout her career. She is the recipient of multiple grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts and was conferred the Louis-Comtois Award in 1996. Marie-France Brière has been developing sculpture-oriented research for several years. By bringing heterogeneous materials together in unusual ways, her work employs strong contrasts to prompt reflection on impermanence, loss, absence and invisibility. This allows for testing the identity of materials, as well as their capacity for transformation, disguise and revelation in order to examine and review the nature of the world.
Text by Milan Bernard
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