In spite of its title, the exhibition Climats (Climates) it is not a call to action about climate change, its artist explained during a talk at the Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) Sept. 26.
“It is just to drive attention,” Montreal artist Jocelyne Alloucherie said. “It is not political.”
“This is a call to reflection,” CUAG curator Diana Nemiroff said, adding that audiences already know what actions to take.
Instead, she says Alloucherie re-examines the question of how to combat climate change by personifying nature.
Alloucherie has been an artist for over 30 years and is the recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Order of Canada.
Her pieces, on display until Oct. 24, combine drawing, photography, sculpture and architecture in the exhibit to take audiences on a journey through her three exhibits: Land of Mist, Land of Blood and Land of Snow.
Land of Mist is a selection from the 500 pictures of icebergs Alloucherie had taken from a small boat along the coast of Newfoundland.
“It is a very long series but each one is different, with quite distinct personalities,” Nemiroff said.
Alloucherie said she saw the icebergs as mythical creatures, but was also scared at times because of how impressive they were. She said she chose images that could be more open to interpretation.
“I like to use bad photography, one which is not very precise, because I am looking for a balance between generality and singularity,” she explained.
Alloucherie said her pieces personify nature in a number of ways: Land of Snow recreates the memory of a snowstorm, using black and white sand to create an “infinite monument of grains” from the grain of the photograph and the grain of the sand.
“A storm image calls upon us to recognize a metaphorical side of nature,” Nemiroff said, citing Biblical storms that occurred when God was angry. She said that because of this, in Western civilization people are familiar with the storm as a metaphor for anger.
The Land of Blood is the first thing people see when they enter the gallery: 10 images of red sand blown across a black and white background line the walls and four tall, white structures stand in the middle of the space, so as to frame the images.
“It frames the image differently and it reframes yourself each time,” Alloucherie said. She said she spent days moving around the structures to give the piece the proper flow. “I like to dance with my objects,” she said.
Alloucherie has used sand and frames in many of her previous works but in very different ways. In Sphinx, a piece she created in 1973, there are three lopsided frames that stand in two tons of sand that she used to blow daily to resemble a desert, in comparison to the scanner photographs of sand and straight white frames in Land of Blood.
Alloucherie said that while her work is always a little different — incorporating many different mediums over the years, such as scanography and computers — she always stays true to being a sculptor and architecture installation artist.
“The architectural elements that punctuate her installations both distance us and pull us into the image,” Nemiroff said.