The city is a mélange of signs: advertisements, posters, street signs, store signage, words that direct, words that sell, words that proclaim. Artist Michèle Provost has created a poetic and personal response to the city and its signs in the exhibition Vocabulaire, which is currently on display at La Maison des artistes in Winnipeg's francophone Saint Boniface neighbourhood.
Michèle Provost
The gallery is divided into two sections. One room features Provost's hometown of Ottawa-Gatineau; the other focuses on Winnipeg. While she was in Winnipeg, Provost walked around downtown and took photographs of French signs or words on signs that have both English and French meaning. One of the tags that stuck out to me was a photo of Louis Riel's grave, taken just a few blocks away at the Saint Boniface Cathedral. "Novembre" was the month of his death. "Portage" is included in Provost's collection, as is the "Dix" in Whiskey Dix. The location of the photos is pinpointed on a large embroidered map. It's not surprising that Saint Boniface is well represented, but there are also a number of tags in the north and west parts of the city, illustrating the reach of French culture throughout Winnipeg. Most of the words are closely cropped but one can usually make out their source based on the font, which speaks volumes in itself about the power of signs in public places.
Provost selected several words from this collection and searched for corresponding images on Google. The results add to the sense of mistranslation and linguistic confusion. Some of the images match up with their signifiers, while others have different meanings in each language: "manger" is paired with an image of a baby in a cradle, not someone eating. Some are difficult to explain, like the cat-headed mother and child above "irresistible". In her Ottawa-Gatineau version of the project, Provost went further and asked artists and writers to respond to a particular word. The results are fragmented poems, screenshots, even a piece of notepaper covered in wax, that combine together to create a kind of Dadaist assemblage of text drawn from place.
Vocabulaire touches on psychogeographic strategies of mapping the city and illustrates the different interpretations we each bring to urban forms. It speaks to the appropriation and misunderstanding that has taken place between English and French cultures in Canada. In her cut-up signs and embroidered stitches, Provost portrays place as personal and suggests that we speak the city in our own words as we walk the streets.
La Maison des artistes visuels francophones: http://www.maisondesartistes.mb.ca/
Michèle Provost: Vocabulaire continues until June 13.
Noni Brynjolson is a writer and curator from Winnipeg whose work has been published in journals, exhibition catalogues, blogs, and zines. She is a recent graduate of the Master's program in Art History at Concordia University in Montreal and currently works as the Distribution Coordinator at the Winnipeg Film Group. She is Akimblog's Winnipeg correspondent and can be followed @NoniBrynjolson on Twitter.
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Michele Prevost at La Maison des artistes visuels francophones
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