Maude Bernier Chabot

On the most fundamental level, sculpture could be described as the relationship between that which is, and that which is not; a relationship of thing to space, presence to absence. And in the thin margin between being and non-being exists a boundary: a surface, a skin. If in an Indigenous worldview North America sits atop the back of a great turtle, then what is below the turtle? “Why, another turtle,” comes the reply, à la the writer Thomas King. “It’s turtles all the way down.” In the work of Maude Bernier Chabot, what lies below the surface is another contradictory surface. Impossible to point to what is being contained, it is surfaces all the way down. We tend to think of static objects as stable and eternal, but that logic is exactly what her work refuses. Instead she sidesteps the false promises of the modernist white cube to embrace a precisely controlled mess, drawing a crisp frame around the sloppiness of life: fur brushed against the grain, the organic capillary uptake of bright dye into plaster, an ouroboros of human hair, geometric forms mottled with bubbles and cavities, silicone rinds pebbled like cellulite, red glitter settling into the fissures of a snowy white field. A pastel snakeskin is forced to travel through the air in perpendicular vectors before subsiding into intestinal coils writhing on the floor; a glassy sarcophagus supports an impossibly perfect human pelt, as if a female Saint Bartholomew had folded her flayed self neatly and left it on the counter at the department store, no longer needed in the future into which she was headed. Though the act of sloughing implies renewal, it is more like everything is born into this world as an already-beautiful ruin. Even artificial materials decay, and decay sings a praise song about growth, and vice versa. In Maude Bernier Chabot’s pointedly unnatural oeuvre, as in the natural order, each folds into the other. The synthetic, the mass produced, the industrial — the things we create that both preserve and poison us — are assembled into their own autonomous kingdoms, their life cycles put on display. Maude Bernier ChabotVestibule, 2012Photo : Adrien Baudet, courtesy of the artistMaude Bernier ChabotCimetière marin, installation detail, The Fourth Kingdom, Circa art actuel, Montreal, 2016.Photo : Adrien Baudet, courtesy of the artistMaude Bernier ChabotLe fantasme de Chewbacca, exhibition view, Plaza, Struts Gallery, Nouveau-Brunswick, 2018.Photo : Paul Litherland, courtesy of the artist Emily Jan, Maude Bernier Chabot

Maude Bernier Chabot

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