Artist statement
In the form of video projections, short films and photographic series, Geneviève Chevalier's work focuses on certain ways of understanding and learning about the living, such as the garden, the menagerie and the natural history museum collection. She is interested in the field of natural history, as well as in science as a field of practice that interprets reality on the basis of data, to better address the issue of biodiversity loss in the era of the climate crisis. The cycle of projects entitled Mirement, from 2020 to 2023, and the Solastalgia cycle, from 2023 to 2024, challenge the conception of the living world inherited from Modernity: a living world that is decontextualised, simplified and exploitable. The images produced in this context show the physical and material reminiscences of former epistemic regimes of nature, such as landscaping in the form of gardens, animal representations linked to hunting, and buildings housing the knowledge accumulated through waves of collection and acquisition. Drawing on contextual and experimental documentary approaches, her work is based both on the observation of the living and on the gathering, analysis and visualisation of data. In this way, she identifies, questions and confronts certain epistemic models which, over time, have led to the invention of the concept of nature. In particular, this exercise enables her to highlight the issue of the disappearance of species, while exploring the possibility of new relationships with the living that humans could develop.
Biography
Geneviève Chevalier is an artist and a professor at the School of Art of Laval University in the city of Québec, Quebec, Canada. She holds a PhD in Art Theory and Practice from the Université du Québec à Montréal and an MFA from Concordia University. Her postdoctoral fellowship in museology at the Université du Québec en Outaouaus focused on artistic interventions in museum collections.
She was an artist in residence at the Reford Gardens, Grand-Métis, Canada, 2024; at AdMare, Magdalen Islands, Canada, 2023; the ACME Studio, London, England, 2022 and 2020; the ArtLab of the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Canada, 2021-2022; Sporobole, Sherbrooke, Canada, 2018; the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Scotland, 2017. Her work was presented in 2024 at the Festival International du Film sur l’Art (FIFA), in Montréal and as part of the exhibition series Faux-plis par hypotheses at the Galerie de l’UQAM, Galerie l’œuvre de l’Autre at UQAC, Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University and Galerie UQO. She has presented her work in solo exhibitions or curatorial projects at Galerie UQO, in 2023; at the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, in 2022; Dazibao, Montréal, in 2021; the Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment, Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham, in 2019; the Musée régional de Rimouski and Optica, contemporary art centre, Montréal, in 2018; the Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul in 2016; the Musée de Lachine, Montréal, in 2015; La chambre blanche, city of Québec, as part of Manif d’art Biennale 7th edition, in 2014 and at the Thames Art Gallery, Chatham, in 2014.
She has contributed to several publications, including Lieux et milieux des arts vivants. Performer l'institution, published in 2024 by Presses du réel, edited by A. Bénichou, and Réinventer la collection. L'art et le musée au temps de l'évènementiel, published in 2023 by Presses de l'Université du Québec, edited by M. Boucher, M. Fraser and J. Lamoureux. In 2021, she co-edited with M. Boucher the thematic issue L'artiste muséologue of the journal Espace Art Actuel and, in 2018, a thematic issue on artistic interventions in museum collections for the journal Muséologies, les cahiers d'études supérieures. A monograph of her work, Geneviève Chevalier. Mirement/Towering, co-edited by Dazibao, the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop's University and Galerie UQO, was published in 2023.
In 2025, she will be artist-in-residence at the Centre Sagamie, Alma. She will contribute to the issue 40 of the art journal Marges (Presses de l'Université de Vincennes) with the essay “Faire du musée et de ses collections d'art et d'histoire naturelle les objets d'une pratique activiste” (“Making the museum and its art and natural history collections the objects of an activist practice”), and will co-direct the study day Critique de l'écoresponsabilité dans les pratiques artistiques et muséales (Critique of ecoresponsibility in artistic and museum practices) with Galerie UQO.
She lives and works in the city of Québec.