Projects > La forêt noire - Multimedia installation

ART-IMAGE
ANNA JANE MCINTYRE
La forêt noire

The first version of this currently travelling exhibition featured a blessing of the exhibition through a performance by Ottawa's Flava Factory dancer Abria FLS Colours in a Caribbean dancehall choreography especially commissioned for the installation.


To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.
- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks


Art-image is pleased to present the multimedia installation La forêt noire by Montréal artist Anna Jane McIntyre.

La forêt noire is a sculptural installation examining memory and human nature through an abstract soundscape, shadowy forest and surreal cabin.

Sewing together disparate references from British, Trinidadian and Canadian culture La forêt noire looks both to the distant past and present with a gaze flitting between the micro and macro. It is an installation full of shadows and nuances, where important plot points are often disguised as nonsense. Something has either just happened or is just about to happen. La forêt noire is a liminal zone where the rules of conduct are fleeting and foggy.

Designed as a meditative environment, La forêt noire is a space for visitors to quietly tantalise their imaginations as they explore a story-filled universe containing both the familiar and strange, friends and foes. Within this exhibition are portraits, homages, inside jokes, the wind, ghosts, relatives, tropical birds, monks praying, mothers laughing, sons pouring tea, babies watching, copying and wriggling their fingers to understand, Caribbean sugar shacks, shim sham do-gooders, Devonshire gargoyles and Yorkshire walls. There are many clocks but none of them agree. Silenced voices crowd to tell their stories here. This is a show showcasing the obvious and the forgotten. The noisy and the quiet all have their say. The forest is thinking. There is no guidebook, you must spend some time and unravel it all yourself, or bask in its too muchness. All are welcome.

About the Artist:

Anna Jane McIntyre is a visual artist with a practice combining drawing, traditional and experimental printmaking, sculpture, puppetry, performance, installation, costume and micro-activism.

McIntyre received a BFA from the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto and an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal. McIntyre's love of the nighttime spectacle, cheap glamour, the complexity of being human, lights and action has resulted in an obsession with cultural theory. Her artistic language is a constantly evolving mashup of Caribbean, British and Canadian cultural traditions.

McIntyre is a member of Atelier Graff print studio and has been the recipient of multiple grants (Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec travel grants & Vivacité Montréal 2015, Société d'État relevant du ministre de la Culture et des Communication (SODEC), Centre interuniversitaire des arts médiatiques (CIAM)). Her work has been shown in Canada, the U.S.A., England, South Africa and is in multiple collections including that of the Canada Council Art Bank. She lives in Montréal.

This project was made possible through the generous support of Vivacité Montréal through the Canada Council for the Arts, Conférence régionale des élus de Montréal (CRÉ), the Conseil des arts de Montréal (CAM) and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) and the mentorship program of MAI - (Montréal, arts interculturels).