[Fall 2025]
Clearing Away the Rocks
by Charlotte Lalou Rousseau
[EXCERPT]
Sara A.Tremblay’s body of work Poids, plumes, presented for the Prix en art actuel at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), is composed of much more than the eponymous photographic installation. To talk about this survey project, we have to go back in time. The piece that greeted viewers at the MNBAQ, Portrait (2004–2017) (2023), consists of a free-standing case in which are stacked, more or less chronologically, fragments of previous works. At once frame, setting, and funerary monument, the structure also acted as a portal: by sealing the past and leaving it behind, Sara was free to go in other directions. We could read the vertical accumulation of materials as a geological core sample of archives that might have been buried six feet underground. Or as a segment of a magnetic resonance image, a carefully documented slice of a body, the entrails of an art practice on the verge of toppling. In the case, along with charcoal drawings, there are many clay and cement balls of various sizes. They are among Sara’s recurrent motifs.
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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 130 – PLANTS AND GARDENS ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Clearing Away the Rocks]
Sara A.Tremblay has lived in Orford, Quebec, since 2018. In a practice that combines photography, performance, and installation, she explores a personal ecology and its connection to the land by documenting the intimate and environmental transformations around her. Her work has been presented at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Galerie B-312, Musée Colby-Curtis, and the Fondation Guido Molinari. Engaged with her community, she founded Les Encans de la quarantaine in 2020 and has been involved with the Grande mobilisation pour les arts au Québec since 2024.saraatremblay.com
With diplomas in art history from the Université de Montréal and in curatorial studies from the University of Toronto, Charlotte Lalou Rousseau is interested in the reconciliation between content and form. As an independent curator, she organized Emma Waltraud Howes’s exhibition The Time it Takes (Musée d’art de Joliette, 2024). She has published articles in the magazines Le Sabord, Esse, and Spirale. She combines her curating, criticism, and writing practices as she pursues a master’s degree in translation.