Blouin Division is pleased to present Unmoored, an installation by Camille Charbonneau, in the Project Space in Montreal. Initially presented as the artist’s master’s thesis project and later at Fonderie Darling as part of the group exhibition A light that never goes out, Unmoored explores the possibilities that emerge from an act of unmooring. While drifting can evoke a loss of bearings, this departure can also lead toward places where new perspectives can begin to take shape.
Long cotton curtains cover the walls of the space. An opening allows visitors to slip through them and enter the installation. Far from acting as a system of exclusion or confinement, the curtains instead create a refuge, inviting us to nestle into the space like a cocoon, or even a pillow fort such as those we built as children. Hundreds of individually crafted bees, sometimes gathered into swarms, inhabit the textile surface. The eye wanders, searching for the nest that might shelter this colony. The beehive is one of the most widespread and enduring symbols within Mormonism, appearing extensively in publications, logos, and architecture. Still deeply embedded in popular culture, it is now commonly understood as a symbol of industriousness, collective labour, and unity (Brinkerhof, 2013). Here, scattered across the space in swarms, the bees have been removed from their hive. They form a community without a centre, gradually transforming a symbol of unity into an autonomous and destabilized presence.
The central work in the exhibition evokes a baptismal font, reduced within the installation to a fragment of its architectural form. The richly ornamented basin is incomplete, yet the oxen that form its pedestal remain recognizable. Typically associated with the rite of baptism by immersion practised in Mormon temples, the object is now incapable of fulfilling its original function: the basin can no longer contain the water for which it was intended. Elements that testify to its ritual function remain, but they have become detached from their original uses. The sculpture thus stands in the space like an enigmatic monolith, a relic of an unknown civilization.
The small compartments embedded in the walls are similarly polysemous. Their appearance oscillates between a jewellery box, a miniature coffin, and a terrarium designed to preserve specimens. Their multiple forms also suggest different functions: a case used to conserve or a shelter meant to protect, revealing a dichotomy between preservation and the sacred, both of which preserve and simultaneously constrain. The boxes exert a certain hold; they create a threshold, delineating a space that materializes the notions of interior and exterior. It is from this position of exteriority that the artist situates themselves, stepping back from the religious framework to ask: what becomes possible to imagine once it has been left behind?
Camille Charbonneau’s work is constructed from images and symbols that persist from their experience within Mormonism. Queerness constitutes the point of departure for this displacement. By moving away from a belief system that could not accommodate their identity, the artist revisits the forms inherited from this experience. In Unmoored, the veil, the bees, and the baptismal font are recontextualized within an installation whose meanings remain deliberately unstable. Despite their realism, and the respect they retain for the original objects, the artist’s images, forms, and memories continue to transform with each iteration, accumulating traces of the present. The strange, the uncomfortable, and even failure thus open onto other spaces, at the margins of those that the majority tends to privilege.
