It’s like stepping into a massive quilt: the walls of Galerie B-312‘s large gallery space are covered in 700 postcard-sized stretched canvases by artist Monique Régimbald-Zeiber, each painting featuring the bold design of a tartan pattern. The artworks are not installed in a traditional grid, but scatter across the wallspace in a random arrangement, occasionally interrupted by rectangles of deep red painted directly onto the wall. Each canvas provides only a taste of the pattern, the scale of the crudely drawn intercepting brush strokes is too large to allow for repetition. The tartan samples form an assembly of quotes, fragments of a larger whole.

The colourful lines of the patterns hide fragments of hand-written text, each a biographical note from the life of the Filles du Roi, or King’s Daughters. These were between 700 and 900 Frenchwomen who were sent by Louis XIV to New France between 1663 and 1673 to redress the imbalance between single men and women in the French colony. A total of 737 Daughters were married to local farmers and soldiers. Close inspection of the texts reveal basic, bureaucratic information about the women’s lives, such as birth dates, the husband’s profession, the number of children, and the cause of death.

Just like the pattern samples, the biographical notes also provide a mere taster of these women’s daily struggles, providing a tantalizing glimpse back in time to the beginning of colonial life in New France. Régimbald-Zeiber’s exhibition Les dessous de l’histoire (2) is a poignant examination of the female condition at the time of the pioneers and shines a light on an episode of Quebec’s history that is often overlooked.

Galerie B-312, space 403
Monique Régimbald-Zeiber
Les dessous de l’histoire (2)
December 2, 2011 – January 21, 2012
www.galerieb-312.qc.ca