In this, Cynthia Girard-Renardâ€s second solo exhibition at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, the work was inspired by the film of the same title, Love and Anarchy by Lina Wertmüller. Large acrylic paintings in dirt brown, green and bright pink, they are fashioned in an old cartoon style. The background consists of prints from the bark of trees and the faces of the figures derive from the artistâ€s own butt prints in gouache forming the mask-like heads of the characters. We are called to remember Carolee Schleemanâ€s body prints, the sex-positive and earth-oriented work of Annie Sprinkle and the erotic, female-centric art of Dorothy Iannone. Girard-Renardâ€s paintings draw us into the sexy and amusing interplay of mother earth, performers and nurse characters with authority figures, perhaps being treated for their fascism and misogyny. We are also presented with the artistâ€s oft-present wordplay, as well as playful forays into subversive sexuality, history and politics.

While Girard-Renard seems to believe that love is anarchy and that sexuality has the power to overturn corrupt patriarchal power structures, Wertmüller has a more circuitous attitude. In Love and Anarchy, the hero is an innocent farm boy drawn into a plot to assassinate Mussolini. The drama is largely situated in an Italian brothel, and the hero is aided by an anarchist prostitute. Complicating matters, he falls in love with another prostitute, leaving him torturously torn between passionate, blissful life and a frightful, violent death. Her film raises questions about love, violence, and power while presenting problems with anarchy and revolution. Is personal love a wrench in the gears of anarchy? Is love is the opiate of the masses? Is resistance truly futile, yet heroic, foolish efforts must be made anyway? Is love is the opposite of fascism? We are reminded of the inevitability of love and death, and of the tenuous, but precious nature of freedom. The film raises questions but doesnâ€t give clear answers, as is the way with good films. Although it received criticism from many feminists of the time for how women were portrayed as prostitutes, in hindsight we can now see that there is also an anarchic side to prostitution, and the film can be seen in this light. Prostitution falls outside of tradition and marriage, and it is outside of love but comes from a place of seeking connection and intimacy. The female leads—prostitutes all—in this film were loving, human characters with real passions and struggles of their own, well-rounded characters.

At the end of the film, the quote from Errico Malatesta appears: “I wish to repeat my horror at attacks, which besides being bad, are in and of themselves stupid because they harm the very cause they are trying to serve. But those assassins are also saints and heroes, and they will be celebrated once the brutal facts are forgotten, and all that is remembered is the idea that inspired them and the martyrdom that made them saints.” Thus, Wertmüller implies that violence isnâ€t the best method whereby fascism may be ended. Then what is?  Cynthia Girard-Renardâ€s reply conveyed through this series, is that love is, sexuality is, the rise of the feminine principle and celebration of the body and the earth are the answer. The paintings in the artistâ€s series focus on earthy browns, vivid green and luscious pinks, reminiscent of the earth and tender places of flesh. In Câ€est la fin de la monde, Mother Earth reclines, reading the French translation of Fifty Shades of Gray. The eye is kept busy with the textures of the tree rubbings in the background contrasting in colour from the viridian green of the snakeskin figures dancing above her. We see figures giving way to abandon, with the reflection of a factory smokestack in the eye of one character, and a mushroom cloud, an atomic bomb, perhaps, girded by a horizon made of hearts. Do we make love while the earth burns down? It seems to say, “this horror exists, yet we do too, and we go on loving.”

Pesistons ensemble et unis features police whose power is subverted as their forms are made humourous. One officer, face bearing Girard-Renardâ€s bum print as ever, is wearing a cheetah print thong and fishnets, and his feet terminate in ice cream cones. The other officer has limbs made from tree limbs, so his body rhymes with the dark background. Theyâ€re goofy, playful, ridiculous. Their power is taken away and they are made into figures of fun.

Infirmière activism shows a nurse wearing a strange net outfit paired with a strap-on, partnered with a patient wearing nothing but boxers and argyle socks. Psilocybin mushrooms are tucked away into the corner, and the figures themselves are repeated in miniature to the left of the canvas. The atmosphere is one of the dopey intoxication of pleasure. A balm for a sick world.   In Triolet antifasciste, prints make two of the trioâ€s heads into pumpkin-like forms, one figure of which bears penises instead of fingers. Above, the birds say: les fascists sont partis ouf. These antifascists seem to be performers, their outsized shoes are transparent and one figureâ€s outfit is striped and animated by the face of a living animal. The female figure in pink has exposed breasts and vagina and embraces Mr. Penishands. She has arms made of foliage, again harkening to the idea of woman as connected to nature and pleasure.

Another pumpkin-headed figure appears in Viva la vagina, this time a woman who emits a pink cloud from between her legs which says “good spirit” while dancing with a Medusa-like figure that is standing in its head, with the words Viva la Vagina written across the chest. In a canvas also adorned with condoms and candy, we can read at various points, fou good spirit, jâ€ai bonne nouvelles, viva la vagina and “resistance against the regulation of our bodies”. This one seems to be about pure joy and celebration. Finally, Plaisir fétichiste dâ€une militante antifasciste consists of a foot-licking male figure sitting on the floor, orange penis engorged, as he reveres the elephant-faced pink female figure. He is snail-footed, and hearts emanate from his groin. The woman says “no place for hate”.

Cynthia Girard-Renardâ€s work is often highly political, insightfully historical, but always filled with love, playfulness, and humour. She never lectures or condemns or brings us down, quite the contrary. Her series Love and Anarchy takes inspiration from a classic film and gives it her own take, one filled with hope, that love and sex can be anarchic forces capable of enacting change through personal relationships. We are reminded of the absurdity of focusing on personal issues while the world is burning down, but also how life goes on, no matter what happens in the political sphere. We may as well take what happiness we can where we can find it. And perhaps that can still make the world a better place, in the small motions of joy.

Approaching SBC Galerie dâ€art Contemporain, words of love in French echoed softly through the halls. Upon entering the gallery, I was struck first by a video of a person kissing a wall with intent tenderness in closeup.  A large projection the dim city streets of Paris, clearly older footage, filled the back wall. Then I noticed to my right, images of a war-torn country in the Middle East. Initially, this juxtaposition was discordant, confusing. Yet this first impression also set the stage for the proposition of the exhibition. Sitting down to listen and watch brought me deeper into the experience and revealed a sensitively curated exhibition layer by layer.

Does the Oyster Sleep? raises questions of the relationship between love and activism, intimacy and community, self and other, and the complex ways in which we engage in the world. The evocatively titled exhibition takes its cue from a passage in Clarice Lispectorâ€s Àgua Viga, with a lemon-juice dripped oyster representing “anxiety and transcendence”. Lispector says “I donâ€t like when they drip lemon upon my depths and make me contort all over. Are the facts of life like the oyster? Does the oyster sleep?” The implication thus seems to be that the “facts of life” such as the state of the world, politics and the difficulties of interpersonal relationships are the juice dripped on us which causes us to wake, contort, and tear ourselves free, and then experience union with the other, part of the cycle of life.

The first video in this exhibition was From Beirut with Love (2005) by Waël Noureddine of Lebanon.  We are confronted by images of Beirut suffering the consequences of civil war, soldiers with guns on the street and vigilantly watching the populace from buildings riddled with holes from mortar shells. We hear a constant buzzing and see the blank and exhausted faces of the populace, shown silent and in intimate groupings, facing the camera. We encounter militia with concealed handguns and their families. Young men squeeze fresh lemon juice into spoons filled with heroin, then shoot up. The lemon echoes the subject of the exhibition. Is heroin that which wakes these men, or what puts them back to sleep, to journey to a world less painful and dangerous?

We encounter another silent film in Un Chant dâ€amour (2004) by Silvia Gruner of Mexico. The title and action take their theme from Jean Genetâ€s groundbreaking bold film—the only one he ever produced—which deals with frustrated homoerotic desire as well as surveillance and interference by authority, and also the erotic domination by said power. Grunerâ€s piece focuses on the seminal scene of Genetâ€s film, where one prisoner passes smoke through a wall to the object of his desire with help of a straw. The Genet scene is intensely erotic and full of powerful longing and passion. Grunerâ€s piece is more tender and subtle, yet also deals with issues of gender, as the roles flip among three partners, two men and a woman, in this film, gender is hard to identify and seem to be irrelevant. Tender, ardent kisses are pressed to the wall, and mouths approach the straw, accepting hot, white smoke. It is a worthy homage to Genetâ€s powerful piece.

Sophie Bissonnetteâ€s documentary work, A Wives†Tale (1980) is what one encounters next on this journey, a film which recognizes the role of the wives of miners in an historic strike in Sudbury, Ontario in 1978-1979. They organized and raised money while their husbands were on strike, thus acting as the backbone of the effort, enabling them to support their families and gain their demands. Labour of love.

The short film by Marguerite Duras, Les Mains negatives (1979) was a treat. I admired her writing when I encountered it for the first time in university and was pleased to find it again here. The blueish street scenes brought to mind being alone in a taxi, gently, then fiercely longing, feeling a stranger in a city teeming with people about to wake. The words resounded and repeated with great tenderness that transcended the personal and extended to all who would listen.  The title of the poem, and the film, Les Mains negative, originates from the prints of hands painted on cave walls many thousands of years ago. Hearing Duras†speak her poem in French was something special and the rhythm and subtlety of her words in French cannot be duplicated in translation.

“Je suis celui qui appelle
Je suis celui qui appelait qui criait il y a trente
mille ans

Je tâ€aime

Je crie que je veux tâ€aimer, je tâ€aime

Jâ€aimerai quiconque entendra que je crie”

The feeling is transformed from lonely longing for personal love, the stranger in a strange land, to an intimate yet “indefinite” love for all of humanity, which embraces the lover as well, who becomes pure love.

The next piece, proceeding counter-clockwise around the gallery, was the award-winning The Future My Love (2012), the first feature film by the fast-rising artist and filmmaker Maja Borg of Sweden. The film was a mixture of aesthetically interesting scenes of Borg musing on the difficulties of a romantic relationship alternating with documentary style interviews and scenes with now 100 year-old Jacques Fresco, explaining his Venus Project, an incredibly ambitious and poignantly concerned enterprise in which he built model ideal structures on 22 acres for a burgeoning populace which he saw coming to a scarcity crisis. The public blends smoothly with the private with Borgâ€s voice-overs as her train of thought is influenced by Frescoâ€s ideas and her travels. Issues of freedom and responsibility come up in both streams. The idea of doing away with money by doing away with scarcity with the help of machines kept arising both with Fresco and a group he was associated with for a time, Technocracy.

Borg began her journey to understand the politics of her estranged lover, who appears as a statuesque and idealistic woman in black, a shadow in her hijab, which she erotically removes, taking her hair down when she comes into a private space. Borg says: “You demand nothing and all is yours.” Then: “Look at the wars. If we could do so much damage, we could do so much good. And I thought to myself, if you could bestow me such pain imagine what pleasures you could cause me.”

Interestingly, Fresco does not object to machines or computers, on the contrary, he believes we need more of them, as well as more education in order to reach our full potential. Fresco: “Many people donâ€t entertain dreams because they only earn minimum wage. They canâ€t afford dreams.”

Of the Borg scenes, the most memorable to me was Borg in a wedding dress contrasting sharply with her black-clad lover, both women veiled, in a loverâ€s embrace. We have a love affair with capitalism, a bad relationship we just canâ€t quit, an addiction, a folie à deux, is the implication as we cut back and forth to Borgâ€s musings. “These institutions also exist inside me” we hear the artist say, and this film, a sort of waking dream, ends as Borg moves forward with her life, divorcing her lover in her mind, while Fresco closes his Venus Project headquarters due to lack of funds.

Passing into a nook of the gallery towards the last film, I encountered the muted colours and smooth lines of an anonymous coastal town, viewed through the eyes of Sara Eliassen in A Blank Slate (2014), which has been played extensively at film festivals around the world. The artist also seems to be a stranger in a new town, nearly deserted, or returning to her hometown perhaps. She watches the life that goes on there but barely interacts. She voyeuristically puts herself into the conversations of others; when a man approaches a girl in a café, she answers for the girl in her head, and then two well-dressed and furred older women critique her performance on video as she looks on with them in a postmodern twist. She arranges and rearranges her things in a sparsely furnished hotel room, looking at a carnival across the street. Later she enters the quiet place of diversion, and as she is raised to the top of the ride, it pauses and she watches a man in her hotel room, then sees herself, roughly taken by the stranger. Fantasies of intimacy and the longing for contact and connection resonate through this work, in an engagingly experimental, haunting style.

The aim of this exhibition was to present the role of Eros in politics today, politics being broad in scope from world affairs to personal, me vs. you, self vs. other, at two poles. Eros is what brings together what is perceived to be opposite, finding the points where they meet, and discovering the symbiotic relationship inherent.