Cynthia Girard-Renard La main invisible

Vernissage: Thursday September 7, at 6 pm
Exhibition: September 8 to 30, 2017

If they have no more bread,
let them eat cake!
Marie-Antoinette, 1789

The McClure Gallery is pleased to launch the season with the recent work of Cynthia Girard-Renard. With her new project, La main invisible, the artist creates a satirical version of economic concepts such as the law of supply and demand, growth and decline, and free trade. Cynthia Girard-Renard creates a universe in which politics, identity, and imaginary worlds mingle across different disciplines such as painting. Her theatrical treatment of the exhibition space plunges the visitor into complex, timeless, and stylistically non-hierarchical pictorial constructions.

In the series of paintings, called La main invisible, a wild capitalism is enacted through bizarre interactions between human and animal figures. Reflecting upon current times and economic questions that have a real impact, characters suggest a poetic space of reflection upon the future, utopia, and liberty. It is a world in which painting, installation, and performance meet in an unbridled fantasy, full of humour and poetic moments. During the vernissage, the artist will present a perfinance. Dressed up as ant and accompanied by her dog Satan, who will be dressed up as a cicada, she will read poetry and publish a small zine entitled L’Économie pour les cons.

CYNTHIA GIRARD-RENARD is a visual artist and writer. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths College, London, UK (1998). For more than 20 years, she has actively exhibited in Canada and internationally, including: Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu, China (2011); Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina (2010); Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec (2010); September Gallery, Berlin (2009); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2009); SPACE, London (2006), not to mention her solo exhibition, Fictions sylvestres, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2005) and her participation in the 2008 Quebec Triennial. Recently she had solo exhibitions at L’Écart Rouyn-Noranda (2017), Galerie Hugues Charbonneau (2016), Uma Certa Falta de Coerencia, Porto, Portugal (2015), and the Esker Foundation, Calgary, Alberta (2014). She is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau in Montréal. Her most recent book entitled Le Renard Vulve, an erotic-poetic novel set on Mont-Royal, was published in 2017 in Montreal.