Eve Tagny: Moors [Romancing the uncultivated]

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Eve Tagny, "Moors [Romancing the uncultivated]," 2022

prints on vinyl and organza, 42 x 50"

Artist statement:

Through a lens-based installation practice, I observe the creative ways in which marginalized individuals and communities commit to live, rather than merely survive, and resist personal annihilation. I focus on intimate settings and relations of kinship to understand how members of  diaspora communities deal with feelings of ostracism and discomfort, or create a sense of safety and belonging, particularly given the current rise of nationalisms and defensive identity politics.  

In the past years, my practice has shifted towards a continuing investigation of the correlations  between bereavement processes and natural (non-synthetic) spaces, materials and rhythms, that  serve as the ultimate guides for pathways of resiliency and renewal. Gardens are posited as man made sanctuaries, spaces simultaneously encompassing all stages of the living, from luscious  growth to decay, always engaged in processes of renewal and transformation.  

Images, both still and moving, are treated as vestiges of memories, tangible traces of what once  was. Put either in conjunction or tension with organic materials, they become transformational  mnemonic objects or humble altars, infused with ritual gestures that allow for the reification of  grief and loss.  

Performing of reinterpreted rituals serves to observe how they can be used to commemorate,  process, integrate, and sometimes reinterpret memories that become both personal and collective  history. Slowly, over time, unfolds an embodied vocabulary of trauma. Through the quasi obsessive repetition of a set of gestures, I explore how traumatic histories inscribed themselves  in the body which then becomes a vessel to transmit, perpetuate, expiate or mend the legacy of  trauma.  

These organic forms and physical gestures are framed within space by sheer synthetic materials,  thus referring to the tension between the various stages of the living and decaying, the immaterial  nature of loss, entrapped, fading or mutable memories, the hygienic — almost impersonal  treatment of violent deaths, and the desire to control our environment as we control our bodies,  whether they be pulsating with life or tainted with the blue of death. 

Life and death can be understood as one same process of constant becoming, when one commits  to living according to nature, therefore showing us paths towards building more sustainable futurities. 

Eve Tagny is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist. Her practice considers gardens and disrupted landscapes as mutable sites of personal and collective memory—inscribed in dynamics of power, colonial histories and their legacies. Weaving lens-based mediums, installation, text and performance, she explores spiritual and embodied expressions of grief and resiliency, in correlation with nature’s rhythms, cycles and materiality.  

Tagny has a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University and a Certificate in Journalism  from University of Montreal. Recent exhibitions include Momenta Biennale, Musée d’art  contemporain de Montréal and Centre Clark, Montreal; Cooper Cole, Gallery 44, and Franz  Kaka, Toronto. She is the recipient of the Mfon grant (2018), the Plein Sud Bursary (2020) and  has been shortlisted for the CAP Prize (2018), the Burtynsky Photobook Grant (2018) and the  OAAG Award (2020).