To understand how local artists shape the material to get their vision of the world, you have to meet them. Spotlight is a series of portraits that appear at the end of each month. Trips to the world of creators who work on their works in an unusual way, outside of current cultural events.
For Virginia Woolf, the “anonymous” was often a woman. Also for Michaëlle Sergile. At least that’s the observation the artist and independent curator was able to officially make as part of the Artist in Residence program at the McCord Stewart Museum, which spawned the exhibition To all those women who were not namedon view until January 26.
“In researching the museum collections, I saw that there were many photographs of black women, but none, except one, were named, unlike the men in the same photographs,” recalls – She. This carte blanche thus becomes an opportunity to restore meaning to these lives that history has made invisible and that the archives continue to violate, even a century later. “I was kind of up against a wall because there wasn’t necessarily any information about these women, but by creating a timeline, by creating entanglements, we can ask ourselves who they are and put them in a social and political context. »Some kind of remedy, according to her.
As these omissions have been and continue to be numerous throughout history, the artist represented by the Hugues Charbonneau gallery believes that we will never talk enough about women. “It’s a pretty clear example of lack of recognition and with it To all those women who were not namedI wanted to reach out to them,” explains Michaëlle Sergile. A bit like correspondence where senders and receivers are explicitly identified. “I’m interested in marginalized communities, and I find that women in general still are, despite the steps forward, so I wanted to focus on them,” she points out.
To deal with these stories that have been relegated to the background for too long, Michaëlle Sergile turned to a medium that is equally important, weaving, often considered a craft that she learned on the corner of a table with a friend and perfected on a jacquard loom. study at Concordia. “I found that there are many connections between the words we use when we talk about textiles and identity,” she adds. Text/textile. Social fabric. Mixture. The list is endless. “It became interesting to literally play with them to create something physical. It opened the door to weaving,” says the artist, who also majored in psychology and sociology, two disciplines that interrupted her university career before heading into art therapy.
In this regard, it is a reading of the anti-colonialist thinker Frantz Fanon, Black skin, white maskswhich inspired Michaëlle Sergile one of her very first pieces, named in her honor and which now resides in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Quebec. “It was a a leap of faith (an act of faith). At that time, we didn’t see weaving as a great art,” mentions the woman who, based on the Martini woman’s work, came up with her own code to create this series of weavings. In fact, each horizontal thread represents a sentence from the book, and depending on what is written, it becomes wider – for example, when Frantz Fanon says something that she considers not included. “A person who is described as non-inclusive takes up a lot of space, while a person who is inclusive takes up much less, because he understands that there are multiple identities around him, and it was from this idea that I wanted to play with the density and thickness of the threads,” recalls the artist .
One thing leads to another
Michaëlle Sergile, do you consider yourself an activist? This question has been asked several times in recent years. “It makes me uncomfortable because I never wanted to be in a leadership position… When I start working, it’s because I ask myself a question and say I’m going to try to answer it by working on something specific,” she said. confides. Such a remark also made her look at the texts of the New York writer James Baldwin, who is omnipresent in the exhibition Gesture: Body Movements and Political Discourseswhich has been performing in Montreal, Laval and Toronto since 2020, and her compatriot, poet Maya Angelou, highlighting her relationship with black communities. “I believe in things that always lead me somewhere and are also connected,” admits the Montrealer.
When she was invited to participate last summer Black Summer ’91 at the Darling Foundry, where she currently resides, Michaëlle Sergile saw it as an opportunity to discuss the role of women in her family, “the first to migrate to Quebec” from Haiti, without whom she would not be here today. . “I thought it was important to tell their story because there is something beautiful about offering the public the opportunity to identify themselves,” says the artist.
Even more of his work Lè m sot Ayiti allowed him to expand his practice to explore the manufacture of wooden structures. “There’s a possibility that it’s not just a prop, but that it’s also part of history, that it gives it movement in a space where people can move around and see all sides of the weaving, because there’s so much detail on it. back,” mentions Michaëlle Sergile. Buildings that today become cloister-like sculptures remind him of both Haiti and the very idea of weaving, “with wood that gives the impression of interweaving.” As for the topics he favors in this new year, they are mainly theories fault. “How can I approach my understanding of these times and my family’s stories by blurring all the lines a little? »And women are never far away.
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