Chiguer art contemporain is pleased to present Fleurs et feux – Les petits désastres, Gabrielle Lajoie-Bergeron’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
In this body of work, the artist explores thresholds and liminal zones where emotional states, sometimes contradictory, overlap. Like dancers balancing on pointe, embodying both freedom and tension, or wildflowers emerging from cracks in the concrete, the works evoke forms of fragile coexistence.
Fleurs et feux – Les petits désastres draws from experiences in which reality fractures, where something breaks and compels life to reinvent itself, even at the heart of disaster. Gabrielle Lajoie-Bergeron’s recent research focuses on this in-between space, a suspended field of perception where images appear at the edge of the visible and the sensorial.
This project continues her explorations of rites of passage and celebration, now approached in a more intimate and pared-down manner. Fire, still lifes, and certain historical iconographies coexist with more delicate elements such as flowers, butterflies, and fading silhouettes, traces of a state that remains difficult to grasp.
Through a feminist approach, Gabrielle Lajoie-Bergeron’s practice questions notions of territory and belonging. Through painting, drawing, sculpture, embroidery, as well as the integration of collected or gifted objects and textual fragments, she challenges the ways in which the world, the body, and history are divided and interpreted. By working with normative codes tied to archetypes of the female figure, she reveals how a single image can function both as a vector of domination and as a space of emancipation.
In Fleurs et feux – Les petits désastres, this tension shifts toward the intimate: fragile forms, modest objects, and suspended images become sites where these power dynamics are reenacted on a sensitive and personal scale.
Underlying the work is a tender gaze directed at the objects we carry with us—objects that, in moments of chaos, become points of anchorage. Modest items imbued with an almost magical value despite their apparent insignificance: a passed-down trinket, a candle lit in hope of healing, a dried flower. These are quiet gestures, personal relics. The work reflects on that turning point when an object leaves its functional role to become a talisman, invested with a symbolic force that exceeds its material nature.
Gabrielle Lajoie-Bergeron lives and works between Baltimore and La Malbaie. She holds a master’s degree in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal and has received several awards and grants, including the Plein sud grant. Her work has been presented in Canada, Europe, Argentina, the United States, and Africa.
