Magali Alanis
Rodriguez Beaudoin

In the geocultural environment of Northern Ontario, the mining imaginary has long been a structuring force in stories, poetry and art. Elyse Portal, Magali Alanis Rodriguez Beaudoin, and Camille Tremblay Beaulieu, three Sudbury artists whose practices are directly informed by their milieu, seek to forge links between the various issues that take place there. Through photography, installation works, and in situ gestures, they cultivate a relationship to nature and to others based on principles of interdependence and reciprocity that work against an extractive logic.

—Laura Demers, curator

Tomatillos originated in Mexico and have been cultivated there for thousands of years. These plants also thrive and easily propagate in Northern Ontario’s acidic soils. In her work Solanacée / Solanaceae (2022), Rodriguez Beaudoin composes a constellation made with hundreds of husks of wild tomatillos that were harvested in Sudbury by artists, and then transformed by the carefulefforts of friends and community members. Painted cyanotype blue, the husks hang like lace, shimmering and coloured by the light of day. Light and shade effects cast on the ground like luminous craters become part of this work, which the artist relates to her photographic work. In a poem, she writes: “Physalis ixocarpa is a reminder of the craters on the moon, or how light interacts with a surface.” Rodriguez Beaudoin also highlights the collective nature of this work and the horizons of possibilities created through collaborations and exchanges. Solanacée… a weightless world, a fruit shared by distant lands, the image of a community being created.

In the state of Chiapas in Mexico, near the border with Guatemala, there is a labyrinth of turquoise lagoons. “There, in the sweltering heat,” says Magali Alanis Rodriguez Beaudoin, defiantly stand the ruins of the Mayan archeological site El Lagartero, which time and erosion are slowly returning to the earth. Her photographic work entitled Paysage en fusion / Melting Landscape (2022), shows a pyramid that seems to be dissolving into liquid among the willows. The image’s title evokes the smelting and refining of metals, while its metallic finish accentuates the structure’s shape, which can be seen as an upside-down open-pit mine. The artist thereby calls to mind the role of Canada’s mining industry in exploiting lives and resources in Latin America and elsewhere. The mechanisms used by various Canadian industries to dispossess indigenous peoples of their lands have extended well beyond Canada’s borders, notably in Guatemala, with INCO’s occupation of the El Estor nickel mine. Having grown up in both Canada and Mexico, the artist sees that these histories of colonization are interrelated. The melting pyramid in the image bears witness to the passage of thousands of Q’eqchi’ and Mayan refugees who fled Guatemala for Mexico after their lands from time immemorial were appropriated militarily over several tumultuous decades.

—Laura Demers, curator