Laura St. Pierre | All that You Change Changes You / Tout ce que tu touches, tu le changes

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Laura St. Pierre, “ Vivaria,” 2018

archival inkjet on hahnemuhle photo rag, 25" x 29" (courtesy of the artist and Art Placement, Saskatoon)

All that You Change Changes You / Tout ce que tu touches, tu le changes shines a light on Laura St. Pierre’s decade-long approach to two survivalist tropes: scavenging and sowing. Borrowing its title from the opening lines of Parable of the Sower (1993), a novel by the late author, Octavia E. Butler, this exhibition brings together works made over the last decade, all produced against the backdrop of a built environment transformed by absence and adaptation. Butler’s dystopian novel portrays a teenage protagonist creating a new belief system, recording her experience in a journal starting in July 2024. Informed by this narrative and other forms of speculative fiction, St. Pierre’s work similarly imagines an unstable future where new models of existence emerge out of necessity yet remain rooted in old knowledge.  

In the video installation titled Spectral Garden II (2018), viewers are surrounded by haunting projections of a submerged, slowly rotating make-shift garden lit by unseen flames from above. The garden, is accompanied by photographs of other “specimens” and detritus collected by The Scavenger (a character conceived and brought to life by St. Pierre) and stored in improvised vessels for human and plant life alike. St Pierre does not depict The Scavenger directly, but instead focuses on the fruits of their labour. The Scavenger is seen through the decisions made as they transform their environment—which plants they have given a place of honour; what vessels they entrust to this task—decisions weighed with a fraught past and an uncertain future in mind. 

More recently, St. Pierre introduced another character to her work—The Sower. Unlike the covert labour performed by The Scavenger, The Sower can be seen at work in the overlooked and unkempt corners of an anonymous city. Performed by the artist dressed in a protective suit to shield them from environmental contaminants, The Sower is intent on preserving the fledgling ecosystems left behind by rogue civilizations.  

This exhibition debuts a new installation of sculptures St. Pierre has created in relation to her performance titled Les Porteuses. Les Porteuses is a matriarchal reinterpretation of the French Canadian folktale of a bewitched canoe and of loggers who gamble their souls to cheat time and fate. In St. Pierre’s reimagining, a procession of brave women from the future enters into a pact with the devil in order to return to the 21st century in time-travelling canoes. Landing in Regina, they collect plant specimens from the prairies to revegetate a barren future landscape. Throughout these works, St. Pierre reminds us of the value of even the most minute forms of plant life, land, water, and light. Amid the decay is an underlying sense of optimism; although future generations may inherit an inhospitable landscape, it is not without hope. St. Pierre highlights the value of unassuming treasures, that anything we find can be saved, and in turn, what we save may save us.