Huron-Wendat Museum
Description of the exhibition
To the Wendat, the relationship between humans and the land and waters they live in—as well as the rest of the natural world—is based on equality, respect, and reciprocity. Through this exhibition, Wendat artist Nicolas Renaud explores these notions. While watching the animated video entitled Onyionhwentsïio’ depicting one of the artist’s ancestors carrying a white man on his back, viewers should also look closely at the surrounding plants and animals, drawn with the same care and detail as the images of the artist’s community members on the portage trail. Further on, a mysterious little bird proclaims a world where every living thing is in communication, across the web of connections uniting sky, earth, and water.
This relationship, however, can break down; agreements can be forgotten. Renaud’s memories of his struggle for the recognition of his fishing rights tell the tale. Quahog shells—traditionally used as wampum, often to seal deals— are tokens of remembrance. Wampum beads, which are also healing objects, invite us further inside, urging us to contemplate those relationships and ruptures, to retake the path between the light and the dark we find both within us and in the depths that brighten as we rise towards the surface, towards the ice.
While governments seek to pass laws that will have severe repercussions on forests, waters, and their inhabitants—and, as a result, on Indigenous cultures— Renaud continues to focus his process on the body and its various extensions—wampum, stories, animation, activism, and more— which he sees as a meeting place for the past and the present, and as a catalyst for the future.
Espace quatre cents
Description of the exhibition
The mouth is an infant’s first point of contact with the world, and later it is a place of externalized speech. In the early 2000s, strongly influenced by traditions of performance and video art, Nicolas Renaud explored how the camera could distort his being. In Parler de quelqu’un à soi-même (2001), cold plays a primordial role, as an ice cube obstructs words from coming out of Renaud’s mouth. As the gesture gradually unfolds, the ice melts and an excerpt of a novel by the famed Québec writer Hubert Aquin, L’invention de la mort (1959), becomes audible. Renaud’s words remain slurred and sloppy: the cold has numbed his mouth and drool leaks from his lips. This transformation, from hard ice to fluid water, marks a transmutation of matter, whereas Renaud’s reading of the text parallels Aquin’s fascination in his novel with fleshly themes of jealousy, madness, and exhaustion.
For Le Vivier (2002), Nicolas Renaud frames his mouth as an ecosystem, extending an exploration begun in Parler de quelqu’un à soi-même (2001), in which he attempted to recite an excerpt from a novel by Hubert Aquin while holding an ice cube in his mouth. This time, a small fish swims within this confined source of water. The term vivier—a basin used for the keeping or farming of fish—anticipates Renaud’s later interest in the relationships between performance, natural environments, and the emergence of plural cultural identities across the territory known as Québec.
