To honour the centenary of Riopelle’s birth, the Musée d’art de Joliette, with the support of the Audain Foundation and the Jean Paul Riopelle Foundation, celebrates the legacy of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, whose work and life have had an impact both locally and internationally. Now, it is certainly challenging for an exhibition to add new perspectives on the work of one of Canada’s most renowned artists, but it is not impossible to take inspiration from his life, work, and reflections to engage in new journeys. Riopelle was the first known Canadian artist to create a professional network in Europe, something that became pivotal for his career. He grew up experiencing the aftermaths of modernism and embraced travelling as a natural way to belong somewhere else. Born in Montréal, Québec, he travelled and lived in Paris and Givenchy, France, finally returning to Canada to spend most of his life in Isle-aux-Grues, Québec. Riopelle was one of these artists like many of his peers, he lived in a Western context between the world wars. For centuries, artists have been among the most mobile subjects in societies, able to travel the globe and cross-pollinate various cultural contexts with thoughts, ideas, and views of the world. By blending the memories of where we come from with those of where we go or land, travelling allows us to temporarily experience new ways of living and to hold onto these memory for the future.īecause as humans “we chart our lives by everything we remember ,” being “born and ing our being in a place of memory,” as the African American author bell hooks wrote in her book Belonging, weaving memories is essential to creating context. Taking Jean Paul Riopelle’s life contexts as a point of departure, the exhibition looks at travelling as the primary means through which different contexts are connected and memories woven. The Latin etymology of the word context means to weave together or to weave within. It is a spatial and temporal coordinate in the collective memory where an individual’s story merges, for a moment, with history writ large. A context is both a physical, geographically located place and a series of emotional, social, and political events that occur at a specific moment in time. A Place of Memory: Contexts of Existence is an exhibition that reflects on what a context is, what it means, and how it creates the conditions for artists to manifest new views of the world we live in.
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