Dominique Valade holds a master’s degree in visual arts and a doctorate in art studies and practices from the Université du Québec à Montréal. She has participated in a number of large-scale public events, including City Shapes, at the Vancouver World Fair in 1986, and the Symposium de la jeune peinture au Canada, at the Centre d’art de Baie-Saint-Paul in 1987. Valade is known for her painting and sculpture practices, and her artworks are in the collections of the Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent, the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke, the Galerie de l’UQAM, and the Edmonton Art Gallery.
Artwork description
The artwork is situated in Parc René-Lévesque. It is a grouping defined on the ground by wood beams framing a large rectangle of white gravel. At one end of the rectangle rises a grey-granite column behind which is an openwork cubic structure. This structure is composed of several sheets of metal out of which have been cut negatives of figures reminiscent of caryatids. The top of the cube is covered with plates of granite that hang down over two of its sides. At the other end of the space created by the artist rises a large steel sheet bearing a stone lintel. The centre of the sheet has been cut out to create the negative silhouette of a figure with its arms raised to the sky.
The artwork constitutes a garden within a garden, in a process that enables it to define both an intimate space and a cultural space. By definition, a caryatid is an architectural element designed to support a load, in the form of a statue of a woman bearing a cornice on her head. Here, the silhouettes are negatives cut out of steel, and the load that they bear is invisible.