Amélie Proulx and Fred Laforge

Collective memory makes it possible to preserve the marks of the past in order to be able to refer to them in the light of present situations. But the conventional discourses and identity objects that materialise it sometimes prevent us from making an objective reading of historical truths that are fixed forever.

By falsifying an untouchable symbol such as paper dollars, where emblematic figures of power are replaced by marginalized popular heroes, Fred Laforge questions the choice and longevity of the celebrities printed on this commonly used currency. The iconography of the dollars of his childhood, on which John Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier and Elizabeth II proudly pose, is thus altered to question our history, of too often unfortunate memories, with models with whom we identify more easily being substituted for these eminent and archaic figures. Against the backdrop of the Great Upheaval, the exodus of French Canadians to the United States and the residential schools, Louis Riel, Louis-Joseph Papineau and Pauline Julien, with their familiar and evocative faces, reintegrate the so-called official history and introduce new and timeless elements. Thus another narrative is created that will force us to revise our own feelings and interpretations in the face of this disconcerting paradigm shift.

For her part, Amélie Proulx uses the coded text of ceramic firing charters as a base and transformation material. She takes out of its primary context an alphabet reserved for initiates of the ancestral technique, the instructions meticulously assembled by the sculptor Stanley Rosinsky throughout his years of practice, to make it a new subject of curiosity producing meaning. The result, through a subtle alchemy that transforms words into light, is lines of writing pierced into a contemporary material and transfigured into an aestheticized series of delicate forms. The passage of time has done its work, until the initial sign is exhausted, and the apparent language is indecodable. But it is the repetition of actions that will survive the alteration of the borrowed phrases, their erasure, evoking the methodical and imperfect transcription of medieval manuscripts. By drawing on the archaeology of ancient gestures, something else emerges along the metamorphosis, the mutation, reminding us of the reality of the years that follow one another, leaving their traces.

Here we see the exhibition of productive reflections whose resonance will be revealed mainly through the fruitful dialogue between the works. By bringing together artefacts that seem foreign to each other, based on actors, facts or notorious objects from our common culture, these two artists effectively illustrate the consequences that a narrative of events retained by historians can have on the continuation of things, when it is reinvested with new information. But this eternal conflict between history, memory and creation will never tell us which ones. In contact with these audacious proposals, we now have the opportunity to imagine them and rewrite them in our own way.

Christine Martel