Geneviève Chevalier
Mirement/Towering: La Ménagerie et L’Herbier

From September 2 to October 23, 2021

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The present exhibition by Geneviève Chevalier brings together a video installation and a virtual reality work entitled respectively La Ménagerie and L'Herbier. Part of a large-scale cycle entitled Mirement/Towering*, these works examine the field of natural history to reveal its many socio-political ramifications. This vast three-part project begins at Dazibao, will continue at Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop's University in September 2022 as an extension of a residency at ArtLab, and concludes in May 2023 at Galerie UQO. A publication documenting the entirety of the project is planned.

Mirement/Towering questions the concept of the living world inherited from modernity: a decontextualized, simplified and exploitable living world. By documenting certain approaches and modes of knowledge, such as the garden, the menagerie and the museum collection of natural history, Geneviève Chevalier freely explores the possibility of new perspectives that could potentially lead to a different vision of the living world. The herbarium and the bird collection, for example, are presented as databases activated and recontextualised by a kind of empirical research that is influenced by the phenomenon of the collapse of biodiversity.

The study of specimen collections and depictions of birds from the Natural History Museum in London and English heritage sites forms the basis of the three channel video installation entitled La Ménagerie. The various data collected by Chevalier details the appearance, on British territory over the last fifty years, of about ten species of birds originating from the southern hemisphere. The artist addresses this phenomenon by looking at British colonial history, specifically at the 17th-century importation of several species of exotic birds for display in English menageries meant to show off the ruling class’s wealth and power. Through subtle formal and sensory crossovers, bird specimens and architectural sites meet, revealing the unique way in which British territory was a witness to migratory flows in full mutation, influenced as much by climatic changes as by socio-political contingencies.

With L'Herbier, Geneviève Chevalier focuses on the effects of global warming on the flora of North America. The Marie-Victorin Herbarium, preserved at the Université de Montréal, and the Harvard University herbariums, including the one created by Henry David Thoreau, serve as anchors for this immersive experience. The visitor is invited to enter different scenes and to traverse an imperative passageway from science to nature to grasp current issues in botany. Using computer-generated images and 360-degree camera shots, the work bodes a hypothetical future where the only remains of a living being is its representation. Inserted into the succession of scenes, an interview with the curator of the Herbarium and Harvard University professor Charles C. Davis confirms the distressing effects of climate change on flowering cycles and consequently on plant reproduction.

Geneviève Chevalier is a visual and media artist, independent curator and professor at the École d’art de l’Université Laval. She holds a doctorate in études et pratiques des arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal, and a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University. She completed a postdoctoral internship in museology on the question of artists' interventions in museum collections as part of the CIÉ/CO research group.

Artist in residence at the Studio du Québec in London in 2020, at the Sporobole Centre in 2018, at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow in 2017, at the Banff Centre, and the Vermont Studio Center, Geneviève Chevalier has presented her work at the Musée régional de Rimouski, at OPTICA, at the Symposium international d'art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul, at Musée de Lachine, at La Chambre blanche as part of the Manif d'Art, and at Thames Art Gallery.