Femme au front (Woman at the front). Véronique Doucet
Musée d’art de Rouyn-Noranda
From October 13, 2023 to January 14, 2024
Curators: Jean-Jacques Lachapelle and Hélène Bacquet
Bringing together in a single exhibition a selection of works representative of Véronique Doucet’s twenty-five years of practice is a challenge in itself. All the more so since her approach is based on accumulation, notably of artifacts and ecofacts gleaned from the territory she inhabits, and is characterized by recourse to a diversity of means of expression, including painting, sculpture and installation, as well as performance, activism and citizen mobilization.
The present exhibition unfolds in three successive zones, partially delimited by temporary partitions. This spatial arrangement multiplies the number of picture rails in the room, creating a meandering path from one body of work to the next. This allows the works to be freely linked together, without necessarily conforming to a linear, chronological interpretation of Doucet’s work.
In the first zone, the series Autopsie d’une autoroute (2018-2019) emanates from a self-imposed protocol that consists of regularly retracing the same route, on foot or running, in order to photograph or collect whatever is found along the way. In the regions, road transport routes not only ensure the mobility of the population, but also the export of raw materials and the transport of the machinery and manpower needed to operate them. They play a key role in the region’s experience. Acknowledging this situation, the artist indiscriminately photographs the plants, dead animals and scraps she comes across while wandering around, and integrates them into acrylic-enhanced paintings. In a very direct way, at the end of an atypical field survey, she revalorizes many of the residues of unbridled consumption. By incorporating naturalized dead animals into her sculptural assemblages, she also represents the predation that our frenzied consumer society imposes on natural ecosystems, while the sheer quantity of debris from everyday objects testifies to their programmed obsolescence.
Upon her arrival in Abitibi, Véronique Doucet was shocked by the repercussions of mining activity on the territory. She then resolutely embarked on a militant ecological approach, notably with Aldermac: plantation minière (2005). She exhibited photographs and samples of water and acid-generating mine tailings from the abandoned Aldermac mine site. Added to this is a performance by an “environmental militia” planting trees in the site’s acidic soil, and a distribution of postcards demanding restoration of the site, addressed to government bodies of the day. The central section of the exhibition at the Musée d’art de Rouyn-Noranda features some of these photographs and videos of the militia’s performance. In 2008, the Fonds de restauration des sites contaminés, under the responsibility of the Quebec government, granted funding for the rehabilitation of the area. Valued at $16.5 million, the work began in the fall and will take two years to complete. As part of the provincial component of “La marche (est haute)”, a walking event organized by curator Éric Mattson, Doucet creates Aldermac vert? (2018). She then returned to the site to report on its regeneration via social networks. In the present exhibition, the grouping of photographs from Aldermac: plantation minière and Aldermac vert? underlines the real scope of Doucet’s artistic gestures, and highlights her commitment to the social sphere, to public debate and to her fellow citizens.
Throughout her career, Véronique Doucet has demonstrated a fierce determination to unravel the bonds of power in order to create a sense of community rooted in the territory. In Territoire cosmétique à (re)coudre (2017-2018), she invites Anishinabe and non-Aboriginal women to bear witness to the violence they have endured by making a huge dress of sewn stockings. In a final gesture of healing, she carries the women’s words and meditates on their pain, perched for seventy-two hours on top of a tree in the forest, covered by this quilt. The object itself and a video recording of this performance are on view in the exhibition. In the same space, the work (Re)cueillir le territoire (2022), also the result of a meditative ritual, unfolds like a mandala on the ground. The reparation of outrages here takes the form of an accumulation and revaluation of natural relics, notably through fine textile work, and offers a moment of pause and reflection on the offenses inflicted on the territory by mining and forestry activity in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region. This dynamic of exploitation and uprooting imbues the lives of the living beings subjected to it with intense, intimate tensions. Véronique Doucet, through her ritualized artistic gestures and her approach as an environmental activist, identifies in an almost fusional way with these wounds caused by a globalized economic activity that shows little respect for the territories and people who live there.
