Hétérotrophies

Architecture – domestic, institutional, urban, rural, or imagined – is at the heart of Marie-Eve Martel’s reflections on landscape and lived space. Hétérotrophies uses the gallery to stage a spatial joust in which organic motifs reshape the architectural space. From the Greek, heteros (‘other’) and trophē (‘food’), a heterotrophic organism feeds on other organisms or on organic matter that has already metabolized carbon. Both the animal kingdom (to which we belong) and the fungi kingdom, or reign, are heterotrophic. Hétérotrophies engages in the imaginary relationship between architecture (representing the human) and fungi. Incorporating a panoply of fungal motifs and geometric structures as “protagonists”, the heterotrophs in this exhibition borrow the behaviours of heterotrophic organisms as modes of growth/construction and thus are a reflection on the cycle of matter, space and territoriality: a playful and poetic imaginary world that plays with the “reign of a reign”.

Pedestals and walls are “eaten”, pierced or covered with mushrooms or lichens, sometimes hidden, sometimes visible. The play of scale—from small organic forms to an entire organic system we can imagine behind each wall, under the floor and beyond—becomes a metaphor for the spatial struggle between humans, who consume and invade nature by building and extending territories, and nature, which always seeks to regain its rights and to destroy human construction by the force of time. The motif of the mushroom plays a double symbolic role here, embodying the fragility and ephemerality of nature, but also the status of parasite, thus ironically mirroring human beings and human development. It is this dance that is formally and poetically expressed in Hétérotrophies.

Marie-Eve Martel’s multidisciplinary practice is inspired by model making, romanticism, surrealism, science fiction and theatricality. She obtained a BFA with honours at Concordia University (2006) and an MA in Visual and Media Arts with honours at l’UQAM (2015). Martel has exhibited across Québec and elsewhere in Canada in solo and group exhibitions, including a solo exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides (2017). She also participated in numerous artist residencies, namely at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon and at the Vermont Studio Center. In 2017, she was selected to participate in Passage Insolites, an outdoor public art circuit organized by EXMURO for Quebec City. Marie-Eve Martel has received several prizes and grants, including the CALQ Prize for Artist of the Year in the Laurentians (2019), and she is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Her work is part of various collections, including of the City of Montreal, Loto-Québec and the Yukon Permanent Art Collection.