This project considers ecological landscapes disturbed by both interactive and transformative processes - including hollowing, depositing, modelling and aggregation. The first iteration of this exhibition, entitled Fonte, was presented in March 2021 at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau. In Fonte → Dislocations, Marie-France Brière revisits the physicality of marble, reflecting on its paradoxical status as both an austere and once-noble material. She explores this distortion of the perception of marble in her work, which confronts the rigidity of a classical lexicon and examines the question of extractivism. In the context of this exhibition, Brière has chosen to present two other sculptures from her earlier work, Feu 2000 and Esker 2022, thus creating a new scenography. The exhibition as a whole operates in successive shifts, starting with material transformation and moving towards an exploration of concretized forms, playing with the materials plasticity and displacement from the quarry to the gallery.
Marie-France Brière was born in Montreal in 1957. In the 1980s, she studied art at the Université du Québec à Montréal, graduating with a Master's degree in Visual Arts. During this time, she spent a long period in Pietrasanta, Italy, where she perfected her stone carving techniques, a material that has been central to her practice throughout her career. Recipient of several grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts, she was also awarded the Prix Louis-Comtois in 1996. For the past several years, Marie-France Brière has been developing her research into sculpture.
