EXHIBITIONS OF
PREVIOUS WEEKS
Week 11 ( May 28 - 3 June, 2020)
The absurd, satire, caricature. These are all forms that may come to mind when thinking about the theme of art and humour. This week, we were inspired by the work of artist Cynthia Girard-Renard and the place of humour in her work through the use of colour, personification of animals, puns, and references to cartoons.
Week 10 ( May 21 - 27, 2020)
By definition, the spiritual belongs to the order of spirit, considered distinct from matter. It is also understood as having to do with the soul, an emanation of a higher principle (notably divine). By exploring the theme of art and spirituality this week, we find ourselves going back to the roots of the Musée d'art de Joliette, which was founded by Father Wilfrid Corbeil in 1967. As Curator of Collections Émilie Grandmont Bérubé recounts in a recent article in this blog, “the Musée d'art de Joliette (MAJ) combines the ancient and the contemporary, the religious and the profane.”
Week 9 ( May 14 - 20, 2020)
It was in 2017 that the exhibition's curators, Jean-François Bélisle and Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, invited English sculptor Mat Chivers to take up a production residency in Quebec to create a new body of work in dialogue with Montreal's booming artificial intelligence community. It was not the technological prowess that made Migrations interesting, but rather the broader issues it raised: how will developments in artificial intelligence primarily affect our lives? How do they help us identify what is proper to human beings?
Week 8 ( May 6 - 13, 2020)
We thought we all needed a little empathy at this stage of the current health crisis and confinement. We also wanted to address empathy this week in order to pay tribute to the work of the artist Adad Hannah, who very frequently involves people from different communities in his projects. In fact, Adad Hannah has allowed us to present on this platform a selection of his recent series titled Social Distancing Portraits.
Week 7 (April 30 - May 6, 2020)
Father Corbeil wanted to build a museum that would be a cathedral dedicated to the visual arts beyond movements and eras, a vision that continues to inspire us today. That is why the largest portion of our collection is in the field of contemporary art. Today, by inviting artists and curators to interact in its permanent exhibition rooms, the Museum seeks to engage in an open dialogue about its history and practices.
Week 6 (April 23-29, 2020)
The question of territory and our way of appropriating it - symbolically and physically - was at the centre of the main exhibitions presented in the summer of 2018 at the Musée d'art de Joliette: Sunlight By Fireside by Kapwani Kiwanga and The Shape of Obus by Shannon Bool. Together, their exhibitions made us reflect on the multiple forms that power relations at the heart of the processes of colonization and decolonization, understood in the broadest sense, have taken and continue to take over time.
Week 5 (April 16-22, 2020)
In the winter of 2019, the James Wilson Morrice exhibition (coming to us from the National Gallery of Canada) and the group exhibition Of Tobacco and Sweetgrass. Where Our Dreams Are (produced in collaboration with the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective and curated by Guy Sioui Durand) focused not so much on the creation of a national identity as on a reflection on discordance and plurality as positive and rich influences within Canadian art.
Week 4 (April 9 - 15, 2020)
There exist many bridges between art and literature. Often literature inspires art, and it is not uncommon for visual art to also inspire literature. Art and literature also occasionally merge into one another. Monique Régimbald-Zeiber's work, currently quarantined at the MAJ, combines literature and painting by treating words as though they were images, and by approaching pictorial composition as syntax.
Week 3 (April 2-8, 2020)
With modernity, humans have come to perceive themselves as superior beings, indifferent to the cycles of nature. Canadian artists Jin-me Yoon and Christi Belcourt, whose works we presented in 2019 at the MAJ, are humble with nature. Both artists assume this attitude in different ways within their respective exhibitions. They consider their artworks to be awareness-raising tools that suggest new ways of living in relation to nature.
Week 2 (March 26 - April 1, 2020)
Art and science may seem irreconcilable at first glance, but it was otherwise at a time when knowledge was more limited. The MAJ’s two main exhibitions of the 2019 fall season, by Patrick Coutu and Marina Gadonneix, put forward scientific research as an artistic subject and strategy. Specifically, these two artists are interested in scientific models, physical or abstract, that represent natural phenomena.
Week 1 (19 - 25 March 2020)
For the first weekly theme, we were inspired by the exhibitions currently quarantined at the MAJ: Monique Régimbald-Zeiber’s retrospective, a group show bringing together the works of Maude Bernier Chabot, Brie Ruais, and Elizabeth Zvonar, and a project by Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau.