ArtLab Team –
September 2024
At the opening reception of Small Things, the final exhibition of the year-long ArtLab residency of artists Maude Arès and Douglas Scholes, curator Noémie Fortin shared her impressions of this process of creation and encounters by reading four texts that reflect the evolution of the project over the seasons.
fall
In September, Scholes grounds himself by lying down among the dead leaves on
the maple grove—here and there, again and again—several times that week and the
others that follow.
As for Arès, she rediscovers it.
This land where her friends have made their homes in the countryside. She has
already visited it, collecting memories that lie dormant in her boxes. This time, a collection of blades of grass knotted into a tiny bouquet and the pink plant I can’t quite identify are added.
Collections of gestures and objects are begun; they spread, grow, and expand
through encounters with parts of the farm that the artists do not yet know.
walking together in silence
sharing lunch in the orchard
making simple gestures with materials
drawing, reading
listening to the land, the wind, the brook, the rain
the tractors, the shooting range, Route 108
the gnawing rodents, the laughing nearby
lying in the dead leaves
picking up fallen apples
being content
spring
Cosmic rhythms influence the plant world.
May 23: full moon day
The biodynamic calendar shows a leaf day and the lilacs are in bloom.
A gathering in the orchard has been planned, with food, “all-terrain” music, and a
round of singing—arm in arm—in honour of the month of May.
in springtime
lovely greenery
In our heads, the angles of the gallery are becoming rounder;
we cover them with paper fibres.
winter
Winter is timid this year;
more wet than cold.
Another February rain and the light is slowly returning.
Arès and Scholes organize a meeting with the people who live on the farm and
others around them. We share a moment in the greenhouse, which is filled with
fragments of their material explorations—beeswax cauldron, ceramic pieces, seed
dust, small watercolours, plaster molds, squash shells—and a meal in the barn.
The evening is lit by the glow of the mulleins that Francine had harvested in the
hope of brightening up the cold season. The artists found them, dipped their stems
in beeswax to make them last all evening.
summer
The paintings on the walls of the farm’s cottages come to life before Scholes’ camera,
like a collection marching between the pine trees, tall grasses, and sand craters.
The Moon’s axis knots itself;
best to avoid garden work.
Arès explores the earth-sky connection and the force that binds them, that
divides them. In India ink she draws an earth-body with its back against the sky;
who carries the universe in its belly.
One last week.
Green tints the landscape right up to the exhibition space we’ve conjured up with
large tarps the colour of frogs, fields and forests. Soon, the landscape-boxes, the
beeswax casts, the resonances and vibrations that animate the farm will take place
in the gallery.
we’ll have to let ourselves be carried
by material tales
sense their fusion
maintain their fragilities
reconstruct the scales
and deconstruct the works
to create the common landscape
of a shared experience
in contact with the earth.
Noémie Fortin, curator