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Canada Post awards its stamp of approval to Concordia artist Geneviève Cadieux

The bright red lips of “La Voie lactée” are now featured in a series celebrating Canadian photography
April 8, 2015
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By Jasmine Stuart


“La Voie lactée” (1992) is permanently installed on the roof of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. | Courtesy of MAC “La Voie lactée” (1992) is permanently installed on the roof of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Photo courtesy of MAC

Geneviève Cadieux, an associate professor in Concordia’s Department of Studio Arts, has joined an elite group of six artists selected by Canada Post to represent 150 years of Canadian photography.

Her 1992 work “La Voie lactée” (“The Milky Way”) appeared today in the third of a five-year series of stamps. Cadieux is featured alongside Nina Raginsky, Geoffrey James, Larry Towell, Conrad Poirier, Harold Mortimer-Lamb and the late Sam Tata, who received an honorary degree from Concordia in 1982. 

Geneviève Cadieux has joined an elite group of six artists selected by Canada Post to represent 150 years of Canadian photography

Tackling notions of native language (a “mother tongue”) and the feminine voice, "La Voie lactée” depicts a pair of flame-red lips — those of the artist’s own mother. The photo is permanently installed on a billboard atop the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), so it can only ever be seen at a distance, against an expanse of sky.

“La Voix lactée” (“The Milky Voice”), a second, playfully retitled version, was gifted by the Société de transport de Montréal (STM) to the Paris Métro in 2011. Now, in the form of a glass-tiled mosaic that can be viewed up close and from afar, it adorns a “milk white” tunnel at Saint-Lazare, the city’s second most-frequented subway station.

Cadieux primarily explores the body as a landscape and an interface between public and private realms. She is also concerned with the way art integrates into urban environments. Her 2009 work “Lierre sur Pierre” (“Ivy on Stone”) — an enormous vine of reflective, anodized metal climbing up the side of Concordia’s John Molson School of Business Building (MB) — acts as a comment on the traditional image of academia’s ivy-covered walls.

“La Voix lactée” (2011) on site in the Saint-Lazare Paris Métro station, which plays host to approximately 44 million passers-by per year. “La Voix lactée” (2011) on site in the Saint-Lazare Paris Métro station, which plays host to approximately 44 million passers-by per year. | Photo: RATP, Bruno Marguerite, courtesy of Radio Canada

A Montreal native, Cadieux studied Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa. She has exhibited at major international galleries like Tate Britain in London, England, and at the biennales in Venice, Sydney and São Paulo. She received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2011, and was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2014.

On Tuesday afternoons from April 21 to May 26, the MAC is presenting Cadieux’s Choice, a series of workshops based on her art selections.


Find out more about Geneviève Cadieux at Concordia. 

 



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