Céline B. La Terreur
A Piece of Cake
Maison de la culture du Plateau Mont-Royal,
465, Mont-Royal avenue East, Montreal
Opening: Thursday, August 24th, 5-7pm
Hypnosis performances : September 2nd, 16th and 13th, 1-4pm
CÉLINE B. LA TERREUR
A PIECE OF CAKE
Maison de la culture du Plateau Mont-Royal
August 24th - October 8th 2023
> Between 1-5 PM
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"A Piece of Cake evokes a wedding banquet, with its magnificent central cake, accompanied by the dessert table, offering a variety of delicious and refined pastries. However, hidden beneath the layers of icing are piles of hair, bone, blood...
These frightful sweets reveal how the institution of marriage all too often serves to conceal violence against women. Erased by layers of cream, many married women live a life of violence. Through satire and irreverence, the exhibition challenges the myth that the institution of marriage is a symbol of happiness."
From the curator's text.
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The artist would like to thank Joyce Yahouda, the team at Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal and Art Souterrain for supporting the project in 2019 and making this installation possible.
The artist will hold three hypnosis performances in the exhibition space on Saturdays, September 2, 16 and 30, from 1 to 4 pm.
Since 2004, multidisciplinary feminist artist Céline B. La Terreur has addressed various social phenomena involving the female condition through installations that combine painting, performance, drawing, sculpture, photography, and video.
With A Piece of Cake, the artist invites us into a banquet room showcasing resplendent artifacts, paintings, and sculptures.
Standing in the centre of the room, an elegant wedding cake catches our attention. A sumptuous buffet of pastries slathered in frosting completes the feast.
It all looks so sophisticated and delectable. So romantic – the stuff of dreams!
But all is not as it seems at first glance. While walking around the sculptures, we begin to make some surprising discoveries.
It soon becomes apparent that vile clusters of hair, bones, and blood are incorporated into the sweets and finery. What had seemed so lovely at first is transformed into a heap of gruesome bloody objects – symbols of violence. The gold dust paintings each feature a single word, signalling a call for help: Violence, Agitation, Altercation, Abdication.
Without intending to diminish the domestic violence some men are subject to, through A Piece of Cake, Céline B. La Terreur highlights the fact that too often domestic violence against women constitutes a worrying widespread global condition. Violence forces too many women to live in terror and pain. Paralyzed with fear and unable to escape, they suffer daily trauma and live in latent terror, victims of assault that can sometimes lead to dreadful deaths.
Since the 19th century, women have often appropriated dominant and oppressive codes, as an attempt to denounce them.
Céline B. La Terreur appropriates femininity codes inherited from Romanticism, striving to protect the beautiful and sublime, while alluding to an intense aesthetic experience saturated with emotions like fear, horror, and terror.
Within the context of the found object in contemporary art (often a utilitarian object, manufactured or natural, that was not originally conceived for artistic ends but that has been reappropriated in an art context), the artist incorporates, among other elements, hair, dentures, rings, jewelry, and recycled fur into her cakes.
To build the structures of her cakes, the artist uses recycled materials, namely wood, plastic, and metal. She then applies numerous layers of acrylic paint with spectacular meticulousness.
Her resulting towering, tiered wedding cake looks surprisingly real.
Through satire, dark humour, and irreverence, this audacious and shocking mise-en-scène undermines the assertion that the institution of marriage symbolizes happiness.
Céline B. La Terreur’s work belongs to the postmodern tradition in which the lines between art and high and low culture are blurred.
Aesthetic value is not the only measure of the installation’s success, however. Successful art sparks reflection and debate.
And this is precisely what A Piece of Cake does.
— Joyce Yahouda, curator
*Presented by the CAM en tournée.
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