Events | Exhibitions
Permanent Exhibition
The permanent exhibition Estevan Lodge: A Vacation Haven presents a selection of objects from the daily life of Elsie Reford and photographs taken by her husband, Robert Wilson Reford. This exhibition illustrates the history of the Villa and its occupants and allows visitors a glimpse into the lives they led, not only of the owners but also the servants, fishing guides and gardeners.
Temporary Exhibitions
Room Thérèse Beaulieu-Roy, Estevan Lodge
In the Land
Paintings by Louise Belcourt
June 8 to September 6 2009
Louise Belcourt is a landscape based abstract painter who works with the tension between the natural and the man-made. She uses a seemingly simple range of shapes and perspectives to infuse air and light with psychological resonance. The landscapes are most often partial views of hedges in the environs of Métis-sur-Mer (where she works in the summer), or buildings along the waterfront in Brooklyn, New York (where she lives). There is a palatable sense of solitude, fertility, need and love communicated without narrative through the composition of the work and through its combination of abstraction and representation, the classical and the unexpected.
Rooms of Estevan Lodge: The Temple of Flora
The Temple of Flora is the fruit of the rich imagination of Robert Thornton (1768-1837), an English doctor and naturalist. In 1797, after inheriting a family fortune,
Thornton called on eminent painters specialized in botanical illustration such as Peter Henderson, Philip Reinagle or Abraham Pether, and he teamed up with the best engravers in London. The first engravings of The
On the Festival Site
Exposition : Cultiver son jardin | Minding the Garden
An exhibition produced by the Centre de design de l'UQAM and the Reford Gardens
Curators: Emmanuelle Vieira, Angela Grauerholz
Designers: Emmanuelle Vieira, Angela Grauerholz, Georges Labrecque
In Candide: Or, The Optimist (1759), Voltaire said: “We must cultivate our garden”. He spoke of our inner world, but isn’t the garden also in some way a reflection of our soul? From the beginning of time, gardens have been an interpretation of how we see the world. The history of the garden is intimately linked to the history of our visual world and of history in general.
The International Garden Festival is a laboratory of ephemeral gardens. More than 80 projects have been presented since the inaugural edition in the year 2000 by more than 200 designers from Canada and abroad, but few visitors have been able to see all of the gardens. The exhibition Cultiver son jardin / Minding the Garden, has been conceived with the idea of tracing some of the aspects of these ephemeral creations, bringing vestiges of earlier projects to the public eye.
This exhibition celebrates the first decade of the Festival in the form of an archeological site where objects, structures and materials are inventoried and labeled, and where we are able to link the artifacts to their projects through image and text, and a map indicating the Festival site where they were originally presented.
Displayed in two defined spaces, a rectangular orange fabric and a green grass surface, these objects belong to two distinct but complementary worlds: the natural and the artificial, both of which are at the root of the contemporary garden, expressing nature and culture as a field open to exploration.
For the 2009 Festival the first phase of the exhibition Cultiver son jardin / Minding the Garden has been prepared by Emmanuelle Vieira, artistic director of the Festival, in collaboration with Angela Grauerholz, director of the Centre de design de l’UQAM, and Georges Labrecque, in charge of exhibition projects there. The complete version of the exhibition will be presented in Montréal at the Centre de design de l'UQAM from December 2009 to February 2010.
Centre de design de l'UQAM
