Partners
A Word from the
Mayor of
Saint-Hyacinthe
To all visitors and artists,
I am pleased to highlight the 7th edition of ORANGE, an event that has carved out a place for itself in the world of contemporary art in Québec.
As an agri-food technopole located in the heart of Québec’s most fertile agricultural region, Saint-Hyacinthe is pleased to welcome contemporary artists whose work revolves around the notion of garden. Their innovative reflections offer new perspectives on our daily lives.
Welcome to all Québec, Canadian, and international artists who will take part in the event. Titled Cultivating Humility, this 7th edition is oriented around the conception of the garden as a space for learning. There is no doubt that the event will lead us to reflect on essential questions about food and agriculture.
Continued success to ORANGE!
André Beauregard
Mayor of Saint-Hyacinthe
A Word from Chantal Soucy, Member of the National Assembly of Québec
As a member of the Assemblée Nationale for Saint-Hyacinthe, I am proud to support ORANGE, L’événement d’art actuel de Saint-Hyacinthe. “Cultivating humility”—I love this theme. After all, isn’t being aware of one’s limitations and weaknesses something we face every day? The richness of a community is measured by the vitality of its culture and its traditions, but also by its openness and capacity to challenge itself in order to evolve.
For an agri-food technology hub such as ours, the questions raised by ORANGE are essential. Therefore, I’d like to extend my warmest thanks to the curators, artists, members of the agricultural sector and the W8banaki Nation who, with this event, nourish our reflection as a community and open the door to dialogue. It’s a dialogue that will no doubt contribute to promoting agriculture, botanical knowledge, contemporary art, and the marvels of our beautiful region!
Enjoy the exhibition !
(Translated by Käthe Roth)
Chantal Soucy
Member, Assemblée nationale du Québec
A Word from the Conseil
des arts et des lettres
du Québec
Every three years in Saint-Hyacinthe, the ORANGE team brings contemporary art and the agri-food world together. An ambitious, visionary effort, ORANGE helps to enrich contemporary art by presenting audiences with emerging practices that showcase the work of local and international artists from a range of backgrounds.
During each edition, ORANGE addresses problems that connect art and agriculture, raising questions and generating a desire for engagement for the good of the community. I applaud the curators, the artists, and the entire ORANGE team who through their work fuel our collective thinking on these issues.
The CALQ is proud to support the mission of this unique event, which, with the theme “Cultivating Humility,” will offer a new perspective on the resilience of the plants that surround us. May this event be the source of magnificent cross-pollination between the arts and the world of plants, may it pique the public’s curiosity as it always does
Enjoy the exhibition!
Anne-Marie Jean
Présidente-directrice générale
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec
A Word from the
Canada Council for the Arts
Artists and their collaborators have played a vital role throughout the pandemic: their creations offered hope, helped maintain connections, and pointed to a brighter future.
As we move forward, we need the arts more than ever—to inspire us and bring us together as we envision a better world for all. Strong support for a resilient, inclusive, and accessible arts sector benefits society in all its diversity.
The Canada Council for the Arts is a proud supporter of ORANGE, L’événement d’art actuel de Saint-Hyacinthe and its contributions to our shared efforts to bring the arts to life.
Simon Brault, O.C., O.Q.
Director and CEO
A Word from the
Grand Council of the
Waban-Aki Nation
The Grand Council of the Waban-Aki Nation is proud to be a partner with the event Cultivating Humility | M8jagen piwihozw8gan. We are thrilled to contribute to bringing forth and highlighting the ancestral values, sciences, and knowledges of the W8banaki Nation in the context of ORANGE 2022.
For millennia, plants and forest resources—whether we think of maalahwks (black ash) or wlimskikoal (sweet grass)—have been an integral part of the W8banaki way of life, cosmologies, and economy in Ndakina, the Nation’s ancestral territory. We hope that through this unique event and its workshops, you will come to appreciate all the subtlety and richness of the relations that the Aln8bak have maintained with the plant world since time immemorial.
David Bernard
Director of the Ndakina Office of the Grand Council of the Waban-Aki Nation
A Word from
Jardin Daniel A. Séguin
From June 12 to September 11, 2022, Jardin Daniel A. Séguin will be a partner in the 7th edition of ORANGE, L’évènement d’art actuel de Saint-Hyacinthe.
This partnership is vitally important because it responds to one of our three missions: culture, education, and tourism. Our garden is therefore the ideal place for ORANGE, which addresses the various issues linking contemporary art and the agri-food industry. Partnering with an exhibition of the stature of ORANGE makes us very proud.
In our garden, artists find a spectacular site for exhibiting their works. For their part, our visitors are enchanted by this melding of nature and art. We believe that horticulture enhances our lives and that art feeds our souls.
And so, we invite all lovers of contemporary art to come and visit us at the Jardin, whether they are from Saint-Hyacinthe or from the magnificent Kamouraska region.
Nancy Rossi
Executive Director
Jardin Daniel A. Séguin
A Word from VRillE | Art actuel
Vrille art actuel is proud to host the ORANGE event in Kamouraska, located on Wolastoqey ancestral territory. Kamouraska is a flourishing environment in both the arts and the agricultural sectors. This “agri-cultural” event clearly illustrates the importance of these two assets of our region. Continually seeking to invest the territory in an unexpected way, Vrille art actuel offers places for contemporary art creation residencies that are as unusual as they are familiar. Here, art settles from the mountain to the edge of the river, passing through fields, the handball court, the various institutions, the forest, the farms and the marshes. It is in a spirit of discovery that Vrille art actuel encourages interdisciplinary partnerships. Thus, the arts are invited into industrial, agri-food, technological, tourism, community, and heritage environments. ORANGE in Kamouraska is consistent with the mission and values of the Vrille art actuel as an organization. This connection, which has been in place between Montérégie and Bas-Saint-Laurent since 2015, allows a fertile deployment between these two landscapes.
This year, for the benefit of the art and agricultural sectors, our organization is honoured to collaborate with curators Elise Anne LaPlante and Véronique Leblanc, thus renewing the association with ORANGE, L’événement d’art actuel de Saint-Hyacinthe. We would like to thank Les Jardins de la Mer, Dahlia Milon Textile, Biopterre, and the Territorial Partnership Program in connection with the Bas-Saint-Laurent community of the CALQ without which this third edition of ORANGE Kamouraska would not be possible.
Mélissa C Pettigrew
Project manager
VRillE | Art actuel
A Word from the Wolastoqiyik Wahsipekuk First Nation
The Wolastoqiyik Wahsipekuk First Nation is pleased to welcome the ORANGE event onto its ancestral territory, Wolastokuk. Wolastoqey culture represents the essence of our identity. This is why it is important for us to both re-appropriate our customs and enable Wolastokuk communities to develop a common culture.
The theme of ORANGE, intrinsically linked to questions related to food and agri- business, is not unconnected to our ancestors’ relationship with food, their ancient form of agriculture in harmony with their semi-nomadic way of life, and the production of tools related to their subsistence activities. Practising traditional subsistence activities still has an important place within our community, and the evolution of techniques has certain impacts, notably for our young people. It is therefore natural for us to support ORANGE’s proposal to cast an artistic eye on questions that concern us all.
Jacques Tremblay
Grand Chief of the Wolastoqiyik Wahsipekuk First Nation
A Word from the Co-directors
ORANGE is a contemporary art triennial situated in the heart of a farming region known as the centre of the Québec agri-food industry. Structured as a laboratory for reflection, ORANGE gives a voice to artists, curators, and other people interested in food and agri-business by holding exhibitions, activities, and conferences. The event presents works by professional artists from Québec, Canada, and other countries, at different locations in the city of Saint-Hyacinthe, and also in Kamouraska, another region of Québec known for its agricultural prowess. In 2022, for the first time, ORANGE’s interventions are taking place for 13 weeks throughout the summer, due to a major partnership with Le Jardin Daniel A. Séguin. And, thanks to collaborations with members of the W8banaki community of Odanak, the Grand Council of the Waban-Aki Nation, and members of the Wolastoqey Nation in Kamouraska, the 7th edition of ORANGE offers a rich and varied program. The exhibitions and mediation activities have been organized with a concern for bringing these Indigenous peoples and ORANGE closer together.
Since the ORANGE triennial was founded, in 2003, the public and artists have been paying more attention to agri-business— an attention far beyond our expectations. People are becoming increasingly concerned with ecology and nutrition, and they want a better understanding of how we “cultivate” the land and “raise” animals. Drawing on this reality, which affects almost everyone living in the Maskoutins region around Saint-Hyacinthe, we have taken a bold approach by posing fundamental questions: What do we eat? Where does what we eat come from? How do we process plants and animals to suit our purposes? The curators of the 2022 edition of ORANGE invite us to take one step further by exploring our relationships and interactions with plants.
As we face the issues related to sustainable development with growing uneasiness, we are beginning to wonder for how much longer human beings will dare to see the world as revolving around them—using whatever they like, whenever they like. The guest curators of ORANGE 2022, Elise Anne LaPlante and Véronique Leblanc, pursue these lines of thought by asking, What do we want to learn from plants? How can gardens embody plural spaces of knowledge and transmission, and how can they reveal coherent ways of being part of the world?
We extend our warmest thanks to the curators, the artists, and all our partners for their trust and collaboration; without them ORANGE could not exist. We are enormously grateful to the Ville de Saint-Hyacinthe, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts for their loyalty and financial support, which has made it possible to accomplish our mission.
Welcome, everyone! Welcome to the 7th edition of ORANGE, and welcome to Saint-Hyacinthe, Odanak, and Kamouraska!
Marcel Blouin and Véronique Grenier
Co-directors
ORANGE, contemporary art event of Saint-Hyacinthe
Partners
Financial partners
Media partners
Exhibition partners and public program
Partenaires exposition et programme public
Sponsors/contributors
Commanditaires / collaborateur·rice·s
Acknowledgments
Elise Anne LaPlante and Véronique Leblanc would like to warmly thank, above all, the artists for their commitment to their practices, their unique relationships with plants and with art, their openness, and their trust, all of which are particularly significant in the often-fragile context of recent years.
They thank the entire ORANGE team—Véronique Grenier, Marcel Blouin, Geneviève Barrette, Roxane Chamberland, Mélanie Racicot, Audrey Lebeau, Étienne Rocheleau, and Roger Despatie—for their warm welcome and their dedicated work. And their gratitude also goes to Laura Demers for her sensitive and intelligent contribution with LA FRICHE, and to Ariel Rondeau for her thoughtful and enlightening attention to the project through the Guide réflexif. Thanks go to Marie Tourigny, Emmanuelle Charneau, and Patrick Thériault, for having so well captured the spirit of the project in their creation of the visual identity, and to Colette Tougas, Käthe Roth, Philippe Charland, and Fabrice Bouchard for seeing to all the words and transporting them between languages.
The curators would also like to express their gratitude to those who made the collaborations not just possible but enriching and enjoyable: Marie-Hélène Godin, Nancy Rossi, Mélanie Villeneuve, Steve Fortin, David Bernard, Julie-Anne Tremblay, Vickie Desfossés-Bégin, Mélissa C Pettigrew, Marie-Claude Hains, Claudie Gagné, Dahlia Milon, André Vézina, Caroline Pigeon, Marc-Etienne Carrier, Pierre Morais, Emmanuel Caron-Garant, Mélanie Brière, Brigitte Mongeau, and Nadia Collard. Thanks go as well to Michel Durand Nolett, Amélie-Anne Mailhot, Nicole O’Bomsawin, Louis-Vincent Laperrière-Désorcy, Roxanne Lévesque, Nicolas Pinceloup, and Anny Schneider for their important contribution to the public program. And they would like to acknowledge Christi Belcourt, Gesig Isaac, and Daniel Brière, who crossed their path along the way.
Finally, they would like to thank the stinging nettle, lemon balm, rosemary, sacred basil, yarrow, chamomile, and oats that sustained them through the seasons during which this curatorial project took shape. This is the beginning of a grander adventure in search of encounters with art and with the life of plants.
ORANGE expresses its thanks to the members of the board of directors: Émilie Breton, Guy Choquette, Marie-France Daignault, Claude Germain, Daniel LeBlond, Réal Plante, and Suzanne Saint-Amour. In addition, we are particularly grateful to the curators, the artists, all our contributors, our financial partners, and our sponsors, all of whom made the 7th edition of this triennial event possible