Annie Bérubé

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Annie Bérubé, “Isolated,” 2019

acrylic on canvas, 36″ x 36″ (courtesy the artist)

The title of Annie Bérubé’s exhibition, Mother, suggests deeply personal content. The show is indeed a homage to the artist’s mother, who was diagnosed with cancer and died as Bérubé was creating this body of work. Summing up the exhibition this way, however, reveals only a fraction of what’s to be found. Like any excellent work, Bérubé’s canvases offer both a deeply personal testimonial and a mirror for the viewer’s own experiences.

On entering the gallery in Saskatoon’s Frances Morrison Central Library, where the exhibition runs until Dec. 2, visitors encounter an LCD screen. Bérubé was concerned COVID-19 restrictions might force the exhibition online, so she opted to present her work only in video format. It’s also available online in either English or French. 

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Annie Bérubé, “Mother,” 2019

acrylic on canvas, 57″ x 84″ (courtesy the artist)

Whatever version is selected, the paintings take centre stage and are layered with underwater audio from the deep ocean and Bérubé’s voice. Together, the sounds and images create an engrossing narrative around love, grief and the histories that haunt the humble remains of the built environment.

Early in the video, Bérubé, who was based in Saskatoon until her recent move to Montreal, describes her unusual career path. She trained as a welder, and eventually managed the manufacture of equipment for deep-sea platforms. This career saw her work worldwide, often far from friends and family. Her painting Isolated represents such a platform, subtly being overtaken by fungi and other growth.  For Bérubé, the deep-sea platform came to represent her own sense of isolation. It also symbolizes her mother: solid and strong, despite her isolation. The signs of decay mirror her elderly mother’s frailty.

A second painting, Mother, depicts a similar structure, this time its strength dissipating as ghostly lines fade in and out, a visual parallel to the experience of watching a loved one succumb to illness. Bérubé says that architecture is not just a shell: as we live inside it, we leave traces that transform it. As the video unfolds, her paintings describe more than the traces of human use – they also present human-made structures as alive and as fragile as human flesh.

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Annie Bérubé, “Ascension,” 2019

acrylic on canvas, 57″ x 84″ (courtesy the artist)

Ascension depicts a wrought-iron staircase, the type that is ubiquitous in the architecture of Montreal, where Bérubé spent part of her childhood. At the top, a sensuous light beckons, suggesting, perhaps, the peace of sleep or the afterlife.

The video ends with Guardians, a painting of glowing creatures on a dark ground. On closer inspection, it’s apparent they are dragonflies or, more poetically in French, libellules. They bring the light from Ascension back to the worldly plane, bits of the spirit world shimmering amongst us.

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Annie Bérubé, “Grief,” 2019

acrylic on canvas, 60″ x 60″ (courtesy the artist)

The works are ethereal, solemn, even devastating. Even as an emerging artist, Bérubé is able to communicate volumes with just a few brushstrokes. Video is an excellent way to present the work, and the narration is haunting. That said, turning the audio off opens the way for other interpretations. These are, after all, structures meant for oil extraction that have fallen into disrepair. Within each painting, a solitary structure struggles to maintain its form, a body disconnected from its community and the land, perfectly reflecting the pathos of late-stage capitalism.

And this is what good work can do: it can tell the artist’s story while also telling our own. In the words of the late French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, who also made work in homage to her mother: “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.” ■ 

Annie Bérubé: Mother at The Gallery in the Frances Morrison Central Library in Saskatoon from Nov. 2 to Dec. 2, 2021. The videos are online here.

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