The series Les floraisons des mauvaises semences : les cendres des épouses de l’ascèse (“The Blossoming of Bad Seeds: The Ashes of Ascetic Wives”) reveals an impetuous mutation. Drawing on her religious upbringing, Annie Baillargeon uses auto-fictional processes to invoke rituals imbued with the force of living and resistance. These rites, rendered through performative compositions, emanate from a desire to liberate bodies from asceticism and its psychic, social and environmental ravages. The rituals of care and collective affiliations adopt a pastoral imagery in which a multiplicity of rebellious, pagan and seditious figures reconnect with fire, water, air and earth as they reclaim their own bodies. They reclaim what they share with each other and with the rest of the living world. Scene by scene, links are forged and the story of cohabitation is woven.
The exhibition also includes works from the Postures des soins series, created in 2022 as part of Yahndawa, a portage between Wendake and Quebec City. The artist addresses the violence and invisibilization long imposed on women. Through performative actions that led to the creation of photographs, videos and sculptures, Annie Baillargeon worked on a persona – the witch – to reappropriate myths and share healing rituals.
Adopting a multidisciplinary approach with performance as its primary impetus, Annie Baillargeon employs strategies of self-representation, portraying a performative body in interaction with its immediate environment. Her images, videos, and performances incorporate autofictional codes into photographic or installative environments to construct a mutating whole. In her autofictional stagings, she explores various facets and multiple constructions of feminity as well as exalted and transgressed representations of the female body as a means to reinvent her relationship with the world in order to find balance.
