The Cabinet of Lake Saint-Louis
Site-specific installation (curated by René Viau), Musée de Lachine, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2015
Geneviève Chevalier reconstitutes a context, a history, by taking fragments of reality. It is as if she were recreating a simulation, a prototype, from these selected pieces in the laboratory. In this experiment, the artist confronts the subject of her intervention outside of any formatted approach to place it in a field of diversified practices. Extracting components and alternating between different systems of meaning, Geneviève Chevalier establishes an operating strategy that allows her to better capture the complexity of her surroundings. Oscillating between scientific experimentation and a sense of the marvellous, the investigation becomes as much methodological as poetic, artistic as scientific.
Four photographs lined up on a vinyl tape are taken from archives dating from 1951. They show the museum/aquarium in summer. Seen through a visual device, which could as much evoke the old magic lanterns described by Proust in La recherche du temps perdu as the
optical analysis instruments such as the microscope, other images have as a starting point fish bones from the Museum's collection. The theme of the lake is reflected in examples of aquatic biology as well as in old views of Lake Saint-Louis.
This cabinet teaches us more about the ecology of the blue space that is the lake, the nature and health of the species that live there. At the same time, this approach considers the very context of the exhibition (history, environment, ecology and museology). Following the example of the old cabinets of curiosities, the artist is inspired by the history of the Museum site, which until the 1960s was home to an old fish farm, while the building that houses the exhibition today was built as a scientific laboratory in the early 1950s. Invited to enter this cabinet with its discrete nostalgic furniture, the visitor becomes the witness and accomplice of the artist's multidimensional investigation.
Text by René Viau
Photo credits
Images 1 to 3 : Richard-Max Tremblay