Thérèse Chabot: Hiver Rouge

(Ceramics department professor)
January 9 to February 19, 2006
selected works installation (art’s birthday celebration and performance piece – January 17)

Thérèse Chabot’s current installation, Hiver Rouge, is an assembly of parts, vestiges of past exhibitions held in Canada and abroad, recontextualized for display in a new setting. For over twenty years Chabot has worked with flowers and other natural materials to talk about the ways in which gesture, ritual and body memory reveal a connection with the past. From her foundation in ceramics, Chabot moved into installation art using flowers and plant materials cultivated and harvested from her own garden and surroundings. Originally her impulse was to show the repetition of gesture that is an element of process, thus forming part of the collective memory. While she has continued to work with flowers her interest in ritual evolved and has led her to look at how power is manifested through it. As is seen in the current display, she often inserts herself into the work through performance and video.

Flowers, with their complex iconography, have long been a subject of art. In the history of Western art, they have denoted the ideas of beauty and transience, the cycle of life and death, and individually, have been assigned meanings such as innocence, purity and humility. During the Dutch Baroque era, elaborate flower paintings depicted blossoms from different times of the year massed in one arrangement, in various stages from bud to decay. Such images, which also habitually included insects, represented Vanitas, the concept that time and earthly pleasures are transitory. Flowers and the idea of nature have also been formally associated with the notion of femininity since the Enlightenment period, when concepts such as woman, nature and sentiment were lined up in a binary formation against man, culture and intellect. The use of flowers necessarily draws some of these associations into the meaning of her work, but Thérèse Chabot also uses her work to reinvest power in the feminine and reinstate the individual’s sense of personal power. Since 2001 Chabot has enacted a Queen persona who reappears in her work, and which provides the reference for her video title, Queendom Tales.

In the first bay (closest to McKay street) Chabot has laid down a carpet of flowers after the manner of her installation at the Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur (Montreal, 2001). In this installation she was inspired by formal French gardens such as those at Asay-le-Rideau, and by the idea of sacred gardens intended to inspire meditation. These forms offer an inherent contradiction in that, within such a framework, nature is ordered and made to conform to a strict geometry and purpose. Her creation of the flower carpets involves a ritualistic, repetitive gesture, creating pattern petal by petal in an act that refers to the passage of time and cycles of nature. The performance Thérèse Chabot created for this installation was entitled Offrandes d’une Reine. In this enactment she symbolically reinstated herself as queen and reclaimed her power. The small “offerings shovel” included in the installation was used in the performance to gather up flowers and functions as both a scepter and as a ritual object.

A crown of fresh flowers is suspended in the next space, based on one created in Mexico during a residency project Chabot completed at el Centro Nacional des las Artes (2004). During that residency Chabot investigated the Latin American tradition of the monjas coronadas or crowned nuns. In Colonial Latin America, to have a daughter enter the religious life was socially prestigious and portraits were painted to commemorate the transcendent moment when a woman renounced the secular world and assumed her new life as a “Bride of Christ”. These portraits were highly charged with iconographic details, such as a bouquet representing virginity, a lit candle symbolizing fidelity, and the elaborate crown of flowers signifying the young woman’s victory over sin. Chabot took the form of the flower crown and transformed it. In her use, the nun’s crown becomes that of a queen who, rather than renouncing the world, is resuming her place in it. To reinforce this idea, Chabot has included the scepter she made for her 2002 installation Une reine, 700 mâles et 26,426 ouvrières. On the floor, Chabot has also set out pools of flowers that echo the crown form, and a scattering of petals that seem to reference a processional path.

In the third bay, a gauzy white garment is surrounded by a carpet of Queen Anne’s lace, pansies and rose petals. This work was created for a 2001 exhibition entitled Contemplations on the Spiritual, at Christuskirche in Cologne, Germany. As can be seen in the documentation photograph, the piece was originally mounted as if ascending the stairs to the church’s altar. The train, spilling down the steps, was surrounded by a mandala of white and gold petals, and the garment stood facing a cloth of pansies draped over the lectern. An impression of ascension has been retained in the current installation. Here, however, there is a greater sense of passage through the space and the work absorbs different meaning from the surrounding queen imagery.

A sumptuous red dress occupies the final bay, its train pinned to the wall behind it, like a peacock’s tail. The dress was used in a performance that took place during Chabot’s exhibition Odyssée, in Estavan, Saskatchewan (2003). The performance piece Chabot created for this exhibition was based on the Homeric tale of King Odysseus who after ten years of delays, returned home to restore order in his domain. In her performance, Chabot used the enormous circumference of the dress to represent herself as woman-boat, an allusion that also recalls tragic heroines such as Ophelia and the Lady of Shallot. Whereas the Odyssey was a morality tale about destiny and divine order, Chabot’s work was about journeys, discovery, loss and life stages. The regal quality embodied in this piece illustrates how Chabot’s work has developed over the last five years, where the queen is now represented as stronger, prouder and more in command of her surroundings.