Marie-Claude Bouthillier

A tarot deck is, in the cards’ ability to be mixed and recombined, like a book whose pages can be reordered to create a limitless number of stories. A small object, the deck can be held in the hand, and each of the images arises from a process of miniaturization, creating an intimate relationship with the reproduced object. Vie d’artiste is a deck of fifty cards illustrating recurrent themes from artists’ lives as described in novels, and with which Marie-Claude Bouthillier conducts a ceremony for a guest artist that is much like a fortune-telling session. In Le Tarot de Montreal, she called upon twenty-two artists to recreate the major arcana of the Tarot. Some of them stayed loyal to the Tarot de Marseille while others interpreted the cards in a larger sense. Each card-work preserves its traditional symbolic meaning as well as certain of the attributes specific to the depicted archetype. Marie-Claude Bouthillier lives and works in Montreal. Since the end of the 1980s, her work has been frequently exhibited in Quebec and overseas in both solo and group shows.