Au Chalet
Project_Magali Hébert-Huot and Audrée Demers-Roberge are collaborating for the first time on a project in the public space inspired by Magali Hébert-Huot’s Saint-Hilarion cottage, with its iconic folk-art decor. They don their homemade camouflage outfits and set about gradually building their cottage, a cherished retreat for Quebecers seeking to escape civilization and modern life. Chopping wood, stacking it, drawing, embroidering, molding, collecting rainwater, and building a fire. Somewhere between absurdity and self-sufficiency, the cottage serves as both a shelter and a creative space. Magali Hébert-Huot works with the Real Tree camo pattern to revisit the history of the coureur des bois and his contemporary: the hunter. She subverts the masculine symbolism of certain objects used by these figures, casting them in soft, fluorescent materials. Audrée Demers-Roberge draws with colored pencils and embroiders fragments of the landscape viewed up close, creating dense images that evoke camouflage’s primary function: visual distortion.
Bio_A native of Quebec City, Magali Hébert-Huot has exhibited her work in Quebec, Canada, and the United States. She holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art – Rinehart School of Sculpture in Baltimore (2015) and a BFA in visual arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver (2009). Winner of the 2015 International Sculpture Center Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, she received a grant from the Royal British Society of Sculptors for the years 2016–2018, during which time she was part of the Hamiltonian Fellowship at the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington. Among her most recent solo exhibitions are: “Les Grandes Étendues” at the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington (2018); “Weather Beaten” at the University of Oklahoma (2022); “Trame - Hatch” at the Galerie des arts visuels at Laval University as part of Manif d’art 11, the Quebec City Biennial. In 2018, she participated in the Pulse Art Fair in Miami, represented by the Hamiltonian Gallery.
Approach_Magali Hébert-Huot’s practice takes a critical look at the dualities that shape our view of the world—masculine-feminine, natural-artificial, and so on. She draws inspiration from Quebec’s history and iconography to create a dialogue between issues of gender identity and the “conquest” of isolated spaces. In particular, she challenges the construction and glorification of a “national narrative” by revisiting its archetypes through a queer aesthetic. Her sculptural and installation works, which exhibit a certain theatricality, are based on the symbolism of the materials she selects and the practice of casting. The permutation of materials used allows for the reproduction of an object through a process far more laborious than that of creating the original—a process not unlike the one through which we rewrite and appropriate history.
