Experience Exhibitions Laura St. Laura St. Pierre, Vivaria , , archival inkjet on hahnemuhle photo rag, 25" x 29", courtesy of the artist and Art Placement, Saskatoon. Borrowing its title from the opening lines of Parable of the Sower , a novel by the late author, Octavia E. Butler, this exhibition brings together works made over the last decade, all produced against the backdrop of a built environment transformed by absence and adaptation.
Informed by this narrative and other forms of speculative fiction, St. In the video installation titled Spectral Garden II , viewers are surrounded by haunting projections of a submerged, slowly rotating make-shift garden lit by unseen flames from above.
Pierre and stored in improvised vessels for human and plant life alike. St Pierre does not depict The Scavenger directly, but instead focuses on the fruits of their labour. The Scavenger is seen through the decisions made as they transform their environmentβwhich plants they have given a place of honour; what vessels they entrust to this taskβdecisions weighed with a fraught past and an uncertain future in mind.
More recently, St. Pierre introduced another character to her work β The Sower. Unlike the covert labour performed by The Scavenger, The Sower can be seen at work in the overlooked and unkempt corners of an anonymous city. Performed by the artist dressed in a protective suit to shield them from environmental contaminants, The Sower is intent on preserving the fledgling ecosystems left behind by rogue civilizations.
This exhibition debuts a new installation of sculptures St. Pierre has created in relation to her performance titled Les Porteuses. Les Porteuses is a matriarchal reinterpretation of the French Canadian folktale of a bewitched canoe and of loggers who gamble their souls to cheat time and fate. In St. Landing in Regina, they collect plant specimens from the prairies to revegetate a barren future landscape.
