To kick off the new season’s programming, Chiguer Art Contemporain is thrilled to present Florilèges, a group exhibition showcasing the works of Eveline Boulva, Cynthia Dinan-Mitchell, and, for the very first time at the gallery, Sarah Maloney. Through striking depictions of flowers, landscapes, and animals, these three artists capture the fragile beauty of the natural world with remarkable virtuosity.
Inspired by botany and the animal kingdom, Maloney and Dinan-Mitchell highlight nature’s resilience and its prodigious formal diversity in creations at the confluence of decorative art and still life. As the summer season draws to a close, their floral compositions take over the gallery, reproducing an enchanted garden in which visitors are invited to wander.
Sarah Maloney’s work, titled First Flowers, features wall-mounted sculptures of magnolia flowers that seem to grow out of the gallery walls, like wallpaper come to life. The title alludes to both the magnolia’s spectacular early bloom — its fragrant blossoms among the first signs of spring — and the plant’s fascinating primitive origins, appearing over 65 million years ago. As one of the few primitive species to have survived to the present day, the magnolia symbolizes nature’s resilience and adaptability. In this bronze and steel wall sculpture, Maloney skillfully contrasts the resistance and durability of the materials with the apparent fragility of the subject depicted.
Like Maloney, Cynthia Dinan-Mitchell breathes new life into the still-life tradition through her paintings. Drawing inspiration from the wonders of the natural world, she creates lush and variegated compositions where flowers, animals, plants and everyday objects entwine with a playful touch of humor. Her bold and enchanting works conjure fantastical ecosystems where all living creatures coexist in harmony and symbiosis. Through these surprising visual narratives, Dinan-Mitchell invites us to reconnect with the natural world around us.
Eveline Boulva‘s monumental work L’écriture d’une mémoire – Seal Cove, Newfoundland – June 9, 2019, 2:20 pm, is part of a trilogy of drawings that sequentially depicts the disintegration of an iceberg drifting off the coast of Newfoundland. Boulva’s practice, both poetic and ecological, centers on the meticulous documentation of northern landscapes and their accelerated erosion due to human activity. For this piece, Boulva combined traditional drawing techniques with the use of a digital cutter. This process introduces, in the representation, “glitches” —
