A monumental, solitary mouth, bright-red lips slightly open and trembling, fills a billboard installed on the roof of the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art contemporain de Montr\u00e9al. A formless, purplish bruise enlarged to the scale of a landscape is juxtaposed with a stormy sky. A couple under the inquisitive and invisible eyes of multiple cameras is absorbed in a mute choreography of gestures that say all after all has been said, and they each avoid the other\u2019s eyes. A fabulous sea anemone floats in inky black as though in a dream. A lone, windswept tree. Then another, fifteen years later, literally petrified. The vertigo of a starry, uncanny night glimmering above the desert.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Of course, Genevi\u00e8ve Cadieux\u2019s work extends beyond these few images that surprise the eyes and the imagination. Yet it possesses the unique quality of producing metaphors, affective symbols that stick to our skin and haunt us for a long time, at the whim of free association, sometimes even in our dreams. For this t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate with her, I wanted to discuss the appearance\u2014I would even say the emergence\u2014of various subjects and motifs in her work. We met at her solo exhibition, Wild Is the Wind<\/em>, presented at Blouin Division gallery in fall 2024.\n\n<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Ji-Yoon Han:<\/strong> Dear Genevi\u00e8ve, I\u2019ll begin our conversation today by going back to a question I asked you in 2020, at the end of the interview we did for your solo exhibition at 1700 La Poste. Referring to Firmament<\/em> (2020), the monumental work that you created for that show, I asked you if you knew what image would or could come after the abstract immensity of the starry sky. You said, \u201cI don\u2019t know, I\u2019ll have to wait and see. I don\u2019t know what will arise after this. Truly \u2026 I\u2019m waiting. I have no idea, and I\u2019m not anxious about it either.\u201d Now we can see that the future image was that of the human brain. What paths led you from the sky to the brain? How did this motif, surprising to say the least, manifest itself or become necessary to you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Genevi\u00e8ve Cadieux:<\/strong> It\u2019s true that although I didn\u2019t know it at the time, it later became very clear to me: the brain and the cosmos are the two most unfathomable places for the human mind. Yet unlike the cosmos, whose image is in the media and familiar, the brain is a bizarre, much more mysterious motif. It\u2019s so difficult to work with, you know. It looks like kidneys or whatever. When you look at photographs of the brain, they\u2019re not very inspiring. Or at least, I didn\u2019t find them inspiring. And I had no desire to photograph a brain myself. So I looked at all kinds of images \u2026 I\u2019ll draw a parallel with something I recently read in an interview that my sister, Anne-Marie, gave relative to her acting career. In the interview, she talks about how she allows characters to grow inside her. That\u2019s exactly how I feel: my work informs me, in the sense that the ideas come to me, but they need to settle in me for a long time before I act. I stay in a highly receptive state in relation to things. I wait. It\u2019s a question of making oneself available. So I looked at all kinds of images until I saw these images appear in a documentary about the neurologist Oliver Sacks. I knew it instantly. I told myself, that\u2019s it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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