https://www.comoxvalleyartgallery.com

The Recipe Project 

CHRISTINE KIROUAC

THE RECIPE PROJECT Exhibition | JANUARY 27 – MARCH 23 — South Gallery

STEPS BETWEEN Creative Residency |  JANUARY 27 – FEBRUARY 13 + MARCH 21 – APRIL 3

Christine will be writing a combination of prose, memoir pieces, and prompts for visitors around the act of drawing writing, processes of transcription, stories of the five women in the gallery, their choices, and her growing interpretations of The Recipe Project.
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DRAWINGS, TOTEMS, OBJECTS

The Recipe Project
2016 – 2024
Installation

I grew up in a French-Canadian family restaurant business in Winnipeg around professional chefs. I am one of the few not working for our business; however, I have not been unable to escape the metaphor of food as more than a nutritional means to an end, nor deny it as one of the primary filters in my upbringing and now art practice. Cooking, giving and serving/eating is the language in which my family speaks. Deaths, births, celebrations and tragedies are all ‘felt and communicated’ through the making and sharing of food in our house, and the reverberations of this have become a growing influence whether I want it or not. I began to pose this question to older women around me… ”If you could only have one food item served at your own funeral, what would it be?” The Recipe Project began in 2016 and specifically maps the pragmatics of ‘passage’ and how we process death through rituals around the preparation and preservation of one’s lastness. Through video, drawing, sculpture and writing, morbidity is replaced with humor, grief is swapped out for fascination and sorrow is overcome by joy.


FUNERAL FOODS

One’s ‘last choice’ speaks volumes around tradition, identity/ethnicity, upbringing, experiences and requires one to consider how they would wish to be represented and remembered, in essence, how these five women (who act as stand-ins for elderly women in the life or memory of each viewer) see/saw themselves in life. Transformations occurred from edible ingredients into bronze, brass and stainless steel that now hold the commemorative weight and texture of a life within them. One would think this answer might take ages to consider, but there is no right answer, and all five women immediately blurted out their funeral food choice, as though it was already in their mouths, just waiting to be voiced.


PORTRAIT TOTEMS

These funeral food selections are coupled with ‘portrait totems’ of the five aged women, each having touched my life in one way or another: my mother, the mother of a long-time friend, the mother of a Winnipeg senior artist, an American classical pianist/singer/novelist and my birth mother. During interviews, a number of objects surfaced, i.e., a standing ashtray, a chandelier, a serving tray, horses and piano stools. Thrift stores shelves are filled with once meaningful and chosen possessions rendered unwanted cast-offs. As a maker, I collaborate with strangers alive and dead as to what items become available to me and what does not on any given thrift shopping day. Ultimately, the individual portrait totem objects I chose now void of function, become poetic and breathing assemblages.


DRAWINGS

I use photography in my drawing process, but not as a means toward ‘photorealism’ or as a surrogate for the source image itself. I am interested in the act of transcribing, creating an abstract map of lines and shapes using graphite paper that guides me through the data of the subject matter, be it a drawing of my mother’s handwriting, a mess of sea kelp or an historic document. Capturing great detail is the collateral benefit of this laborious practice, not the goal. There is no rogue emoting in the initial abstract maps I create. I draw as I write, left to right, from up down, row by row, focusing on principles of value and form, and it is through that commitment that an unconscious scrutinization and perhaps understanding of the subject matter happens, over time, and sometimes a very long time. A drawing takes as long as it takes.

 

Adoption Abstract: Page 1 & 2
27” w x 40” h each
graphite, pencil crayon + ink on paper

In 1995, I went to the Winnipeg Adoption Agency on Portage Avenue to register. I was twenty-six. If my biological mother had also registered, a match could be made. Within a month, I received an envelope in the mail containing two pages of data, as filtered through the intake adoption councilor in 1968. These two drawings are the body of text I received about my biological parents and their families. Last year, I invited my biological mother (whom I met at twenty-six) to read this document (of which she has never seen till now) and write her own revisions on the pages themselves: responses addressing the accuracy of the compiled facts in her mind, the misunderstandings, her perceptions, contradictions and memories of the interview, interviewer. Her writing is in red and green ink. I did the same process in blue ink, recalling how peculiar and inaccessible these descriptions in black and white words seemed to me at the time, then and now. These portraits drawn by the text essentially provide no faces or forms for me; how abstract this government issued abstract was, and still is as a drawn recording of the past and present at once.


VIDEOS

Hybred
2008
single channel video loop | 9:33 min.

In Hybred, I translate a conversation with my mother into an exploration of the stereotypes and subjectivities surrounding my Métis identity (Cree/Irish). Set in the kitchen of our family home as my mother prepares a pumpkin pie, history becomes the site of debate as I pose a series of questions related to my adoption as a baby, amidst a series of jokes collected from the Internet. In the verbal exchange, staples of small talk are turned into negotiations as artist and mother struggle to find a place of mutual understanding. Across anecdotes, memories, confrontations, and crude politically incorrect jokes related to Irish and Aboriginal stereotypes, the human side of a patchwork history is uncovered as we navigate the disconnect between generations. Beneath the banter, mum and I display contrasting approaches to the traditions of storytelling and attitudes towards race as we reflect the difficulties of finding a common language. In the process, we move between opposing positions of humor and frustration, as in the end the legacy of ethnic expectations is rescaled to the people they most affect.

 

Nectarine
2023
single channel video loop | 9:05 min.

This is a story told in two time frames, twenty years apart. The footage is my mother recalling a childhood memory, once in 2008 (the year Hybred was made) and the same memory told to me by her in 2021. She is peeling apples in both scenes, the same story, different apples. In 2008, she stabs them with a knife to pick them up, flipping the rotten ones in the bin and peeling the good ones as she talks.

As a filmmaker, I edit back and forth between these two time frames, while in her telling she tries to stay in the same childhood place, where she grew up in a fishing village on the East Coast beside a New Brunswick Mi’kmaq Indian reserve (of whom she refers to a few times as Big Mac Indians, without the slightest malice or contempt). She would be considered by many as a ‘colonialist’ now, a bad word wrought with the weight of Indigenous genocide. But she is just a child in her story, recalling the neighboring Indians picking apples in her father’s orchard, then leaving hand woven baskets on their porch in return. She tries to be truthful, but age cruelly contradicts her. Thinking back she calls them ‘our Indians’, not as a political possessive, but with the endearment she calls her own adopted children now. At times, her memory is met with forgetfulness, exact details repeated word for word with a span of twenty years between them, while other parts are riddled with convincing contradiction. As this elderly woman continues to peel the apples naked, she willingly exposes genuine thoughts on the past sharing of the land and sea while fragments of history, beliefs, values, facts and fiction fall into her baking bowl. The video serves up a tense and humorous narrative about cohabitation, survival, sustenance, and generational perceptions. I try to use the intimacy of this tender tale as a bridge between my mother and my own Métis identity while asking the viewer to ponder: who is the apple and who is the nectarine?


BIOGRAPHY | Christine Kirouac

Christine Kirouac is a Winnipeg-based Métis artist/writer whose interdisciplinary projects are a negotiation of (dis)placement and (non)acceptance. She crafts provocative work through a lens of humor, fearlessness, personal intimacy and experience that exposes struggles to translate and transcribe “belonging”. Alluring, absurd, and always open-ended Kirouac prefers the uncomfortable tease to the whole, leaving a trail of impressions and questions to linger.

Acknowledgements

The Comox Valley Art Gallery is grateful to operate on the UncededTraditional Territory of the K’ómoks First Nations.

CVAG is honored to collaborate with artists, writers, guest curators, community partners + volunteers. We are grateful for the support of our members + donors.

This convergent program is made possible through the support of our FUNDERS: City of Courtenay, Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, Government of Canada, Province of BC,  Comox Valley Regional District, Town of Comox | LOCAL SUPPORT: School District 71 Printshop, Sherwin Williams, Hitec Screen Printing, Shine-Eze Ltd., BoomBright Media

ARTIST ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Manitoba Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts

             


Artist’s Website

christinekirouac.com