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Note éditoriale

Edith-Anne Pageot and Dominic Hardy

Horatio Walker à New York (1885-1916) : la volonté de faire carrière entre proximité et distance

Didier Prioul
Historiography has given us the image of Horatio Walker as an artist in harmony with the rural environment of the île d’Orléans, where the tutelary figure of Jean-François Millet is never far away. Our objective is to reverse this view by exploring the only living environment where his career was at stake for more than thirty years: the Island of Manhattan. Based on an analysis of exhibition spaces, the singular position of Newman Montross, and the emergence of professional art criticism, we see Walker’s desire to succeed and make a name for himself come true. Through a complex dynamic between proximity and distance – geographical, social, and artistic – he occupies a unique place in the visibility and control of his works. In this, he understood that to have a career and last in New York, the artist must establish a clear distinction between creating and marketing his works.

Le Monument permanent à la mémoire des six millions de victimes juives de l’Holocauste de Marcelle Ferron : édifier une nouvelle mémoire visuelle québécoise pour la commémoration de l’Holocauste

Franck Calard
This article explores the creation and significance of the Monument permanent à la mémoire des six millions de victimes juives de l’Holocauste, created by Quebec artist Marcelle Ferron in 1970 for the headquarters of the Canadian Jewish Congress in Montreal. This research examines the historical and social context of Quebec’s Holocaust commemoration, as well as the motivations for the Canadian Jewish Congress to select Ferron, a non-Jewish artist, for this project. The author also analyses the symbolic and aesthetic aspects of the Monument, a glass screen window incorporating elements of commemorative and religious stained-glass, and highlights its unique place in the artist’s work. Finally, the article highlights the importance of this monument as a testimony to the translation of the Holocaust in Quebec and as a symbol of the complex and evolving relationship between the Jewish community and Quebec society.

Le champ-texte : la plénitude d’un supposé vide

Gisèle Trudel
From 2021 to 2024, four distinct immersive audiovisual installations were produced in situ by the MÉDIANE Research Chair. These annual installations, each of them built with scaffolding and audiovisual equipment, presented distinct research-creation approaches as linked to the artistic expression of the sensor-data of trees and their immediate environment. The numerical data were provided and analyzed in collaboration with two scientific groups, Smartforests Canada (UQAM) and DOT-Lab (Université TÉLUQ), which both study the effects of climate change on forest plots in Canada. This essay explores the emergence of a text field resulting from anonymous comments provided in response to one of the seven questions which constituted a semi-structured interview. It was conducted during the presentation of the artworks in outdoor spaces. The interview enabled to conduct qualitative research into the public's experiences and knowledges.

À la rencontre de la forêt avec Henry David Thoreau et Domingo Cisneros

David Howes
This article lays out two unconventional and markedly sensuous modes of encountering the forest: the aesthetic asceticism of the iconic naturalist/settler Henry David Thoreau and the militant botanical/ zoological/ecological and gastronomical approach to the wilderness of the mestizo artist and writer Domingo Cisneros. The latter migrated from Mexico to Quebec in 1968 and, among other pursuits, between 1974 and 1976 directed the Département d’art autochthone et communication at Collège Manitou in La Macaza in the Laurentides region. In 2018 he was awarded an honourary doctorate by the Université du Quebec à Montreal in recognition of his contribution to contemporary art.This article, or “étude sensorielle,” seeks to articulate an aesthetic forestry in response to an invitation from the Chaire de recherche du Canada en arts, écotechnologies de pratique et changements climatiques (ou MÉDIANE), Gisèle Trudel, to bring a sensory ethnographic approach to bear on the interpretation of la pensée arborescent, and advancement of a “science of the concrete”.

Traces de l’architecture précolombienne dans le récit historique du XIXe siècle : William H. Prescott et le mythe de l’architecture inca dans les Amériques

Bianca Natalia Sanguino Lemus
The way the history of the Americas and their architecture has been told directly influences our interpretation of the territory. Notions of primitivism associated with pre-Columbian architecture, in contrast with ideas of progress tied to European architecture, originate in narratives consecrated by traditional history. Given that the inclusion of pre-Columbian architecture in texts on global architecture is relatively recent, it is essential to examine texts such as The History of the Conquest of Peru by William H. Prescott, which shed light on the perception of Indigenous cultures—specifically the Inca civilization—and on the myth of conquest in the 19th century, a period marked by Romanticism and the identity-building of American nations following the Independence movements, which also coincides with the founding of the first architecture schools on the continent.