Marguerite is an exhibition that is a story of history and memory, landscape, struggle, and permission, denial and imagination. Where there is promise, there is strength. The exhibition is also and again the artist’s own story. I am Marguerite, I am landscape in November.
The work of art writes a story, declares a history, inscribes in words an imagined existence. The inscription is text. But this text is poetry, history flirting with aesthetics. This is pleasure, born in furtive desire. Where can it be imagined that the motivation for this investigation is supplied?. (And to write about this art, one wonders how could a commentator presume to add another text to an exhibition that is so manifestly textual?) It is impressive that Katherine Knight has been captured in this piece of history and has been compelled to research and explore the life of Marguertie, to give it new life, in a new form. It is astounding that the art she should make is such a compounding identities of the artist with the nun and with the landscape. If this were to be taken further how far away would the viewers have been led if they were to confuse th artist and the art? Katherine Knight has written again the story of Marguerite Bourgeoys, first teacher in Montréal, first uncloistered nun in Canada, foundress of one order, first superior in one history, as the poetic text in the exhibition begins. The historical woman is easily enough described by her deeds and her circumstances. A Canadian encyclopedia inforums us that she was born at Troyes, in France on April 17th 1620. She sailed for Canada in 1967 and a year later opened a girls’ school in a stable on Montréal Island. In the expression of her duty, Marguerite recruited French and Canadian girls as teachers, organized a boarding school for girls in Montréal, a school for Indian girls on the Sulpician reserve of La Montagne, and a domestic arts school and a primary school in Québec City. ON July 1st 1698, the secular sisters took simple vows and became a recognized non-cloistered religious community. Marguerite Bourgeoys spent her last two years in meditation and prayer, already revered as a saint when she died in 1700. Pierre Leber painted her portrait from her corpse in her coffin, the painting now in the possession of the sister of the orer in Montréal. Marguerite was canonized on October 31st 1982. It is by metaphoric supplement however that the persona we meet in this exhibition is shifted and expanded from the historical Marguerite. This aching body of woman, this obedient servant of established orders, by an astonishing imaginary act is re-created in the declarative. “I am name.” By poetry, her typographic drama fills the gallery space with pure imagination. This exhibition is an historical poetic drama played out in vivid words, as if pictures were not enough, and could not show enough of the stretch of the landscape, the sweep of the imagination, nor the measure of history traversed. While the person in the text who declares ‘I am Marguerite’ is a poet and a raconteuse of some historical moemtns in Marguerite’s life. She is a womean vulnerable but not subordinate to her surroundings and social constraints. ‘What I have been given. What I am permitted.’ She writes of the hardships of the land and climate, the strength she evinces to meet the challenges and the constrictions of her body, her clothing, her landscape, her duty. Marguerite wanted to be an active nun in an uncloistered order, working in the social world of the new territory, a new social landscape. This installation by Katherine Knight touches on issues of achievement within set boundaries. Landscape is an ideal metaphor for this purpose because it surrounds you, as does history, as does one’s social context. Marguerite is the landscape. The story in history. This is our country. The photographs taken by Knight are of scenes related to her life and death of Marguerite. These images contribute to a statement about architecture and landscape as context in which lives proceed and pass – landscape and architecture as boundaries, as constraints in history and in place. Knight’s installation can be seen to be about being surrounded and yet going farther than you know. Yet the tone of the text is suffused with resignation to the circumstances. There is an identity with landscape and particularly the path of water. ‘Water be my journey.’ ‘Water be my standard.’ And as obedient and changeable as water can be, it’s path is irrepressible. Daniel Sharp, G101 Artistic Director