Geneviève Cadieux: Here you may see the best portrait that, later, I was able to make of him. Passages to Abstraction.

Curated by Vincent Bonin

Organized and circulated by the Musée d’art de Joliette with financial support from the Museums Assistance Program, Department of Canadian Heritage.

OPENING RECEPTIONS AND TOURS Saturday 21 March

MSVU Art Gallery at 2 PM and at the Dalhousie Art Gallery at 4 PM

The artist and curator will be present.

This exhibition encompasses 27 years of production by Geneviève Cadieux. It is divided into two parts with the earliest photo-based and multi-media work presented at MSVU Art Gallery and all other works, dating from 1987 through 2012, mounted at Dalhousie Art Gallery.

In much of her work, Cadieux explores the emotional implications of acts of looking and being looked at. Framed by the psychoanalytic term of “The Gaze” – where ‘looking’ is intertwined with the dynamics of ‘desire’ – Cadieux both invites and thwarts ‘the gaze’ by rendering visual signifiers as enigmatic or unstable in their meaning. Vincent Bonin, the exhibition’s curator, focuses on an aspect of Cadieux’s work that has so far been little explored: the passage from representation to abstraction, and back again. Her early works, Ravissement (1985) and La blessure d’une cicatrice ou Les Anges (1987), are presented at MSVU Art Gallery; the installation at Dalhousie Art Gallery brings together large-scaled photographs in which Cadieux uses landscape as a visual structure to reflect upon monochrome painting and minimalist sculpture. In so doing, she reappraises much of the abstract photography that emerged with the avant-garde movements of the 20th century.