7th Edition
Contemporary
Art Event
June 12 —
September 11
2022
2022
7th Edition
Contemporary
Art Event
June 12 —
September 11
2022
Zoé Fortier

Zoé
Fortier

Zoé Fortier, Les poinçonneuses, projet de recherche multidisciplinaire (détail), 2017-2021
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EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition

Jardin Daniel A. Séguin

Les poinçonneuses, 2017-2021
Installation: collages, drawings, audio recordings

In Les poinçonneuses, artist Zoé Fortier adopts a auto-ethnographic approach as she explores her relationship with leaf-cutting bees. Her family’s beekeeping business in the Francophone village of Zenon Park, Saskatchewan, has been working with these pollinating insects, also called megachiles, since the 1960s. Fortier attentively gathers, observes, draws, transforms, and reproduces the traces that she finds of the bees—which make their hives with bits of leaves taken from young shrubs—and creates an archive, both authentic and fanciful, around them. She thus tells two stories that both contradict and yet are superimposed on each other: that of a close interdependent relationship among the human beings, insects, and plants engaged in the practice of beekeeping, and that of the agrifood industry in Saskatchewan, known as the “breadbasket of Canada,” with its profound transformations of the land, exploitation of different forms of life, and identity constructions. Fortier situates herself in the scene, with both sensitivity and humour, to undermine the dichotomies of  city/countryside, natural environment/manufactured landscape, interdependence/exploitation, and thus to revisit our relationship with the living world.

Zoé Fortier
Photo credit: Hannah Alex

Zoé Fortier is an interdisciplinary Fransaskois artist from Zenon Park, Saskatchewan. She holds a diploma in new media arts from the University of St. Boniface in Manitoba and a double honours degree in anthropology and studio arts from the University of Saskatchewan. In her art practice, she uses ethnographic research methods; recently, she has focused on exploring how culture and language serve as interpretation tools for human experience. Using drawing, collage, and installation, she attempts to bring the immaterial patrimony into materiality and thus to make the invisible visible.

Zoé Fortier, Les poinçonneuses, projet de recherche multidisciplinaire (détail), 2017-2021
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Zoé Fortier, Les poinçonneuses, photographie extraite du projet de recherche multidisciplinaire, 2017-2021
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Zoé Fortier, Les poinçonneuses, multidisciplinary research project (detail), 2017-2021

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Zoé Fortier, Les poinçonneuses, multidisciplinary research project (detail), 2017-2021

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Zoé Fortier, Les poinçonneuses, photograph from multidisciplinary research project, 2017-2021