Anne-Marie St-Jean-Aubre

Musée d’art de Joliette

Strategies of reversal: the works of Nadège Grebmeier Forget and Michelle Lacombe (in French)

Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Trois réflexions (2014), view of the exhibition De la parole aux actes/Actions Must Match Words (2015), Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, Saint-Jérôme
Photo: Lucien Lisabelle

In 2015, at the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, I put together the exhibition De la parole aux actes [actions must match words], which put the works of thirteen Western and Indigenous artists, mostly women, into dialogue in order to reflect on “inner colonization.” The exhibition was interested in the role that language and education play in the incorporation of norms governing behaviours. Nadège Grebmeier Forget and Michelle Lacombe each proposed to revisit a work that was not created with the goal of being transposed into an exhibition. In this presentation, I will focus on Grebmeier Forget performance Trois réflexions (2014) and Lacombe body action Italics; Underlining for emphasis (2015) in order to reflect on the way in which those artists, in the passage from action to its display or its reconstitution, have evaded being locked into a reification relation by turning the projector back on the viewer, who is also an object of the gaze in the exhibition space.

Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre is curator of contemporary art at Musée d’art de Joliette since 2017. She holds an MA in art history from UQAM and a BA in fine arts and French Literature from the University of Ottawa. She is particularity interested in artistic practices that explore the way in which identity is constructed at the intersection of several discourses and experiences linked to culture, gender, sex and race. Before joining the Musée d’art de Joliette team, she worked at the Fonderie Darling, the SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art and Ciel Variable magazine, in addition to developing projects as an independent curator. In Joliette she has, among other things, curated projects with the artists Kapwani Kiwanga, Shannon Bool, Jin-me Yoon, the Leisure collective, Monique Régimbald-Zeiber as well as Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau.