MONTREAL, CANADA.- Following in the tradition of the Québec storytellers, artist Cynthia Girard presents Fictions sylvestres (Sylvan Fictions) at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal from January 26 to April 24, 2005. Lumberjack, cord of wood, axe-it's all there. Each painting offers a tale of logging and wood in general, but the stories are all recounted against a backdrop of blue acrylic and with humour as sharp as a jagged saw!

For her first solo exhibition at the Musée, Girard has created a brand- new series of nine paintings produced in the past year. Continuing her examination of the Québec collective identity, the artist now tackles one of the major aspects of the province's socio-economic development, namely exploitation of our forests, understood here as both natural resource and industry. Comparing past and present, economy and ecology, she denounces our contradictions and equivocations with respect to all-out logging and, more generally, the use of natural resources. Visually, the artist also works on two levels. She borrows a formal vocabulary from folk art-tree, bird, axe-at the same time as she refers to the formalist approach by quoting, in passing, Claude Tousignant's target motif. In form as well as content, she thus brings out a particular ambivalence felt by Quebecers.

Girard first came to public notice with her trilogy Le Pavillon du Québec, highlighting Québec history and memory. The large canvases of Premier volet: de 1940 à nos jours (Centre des arts actuels Skol, Montréal, 2001), Deuxième volet: la Nouvelle-France (Galerie Clark, Montréal, 2002) and Troisième volet: le panthéon (Galerie B-312, Montréal, 2004) reinterpreted history, history painting and art history in Québec. The official stories and the footnotes of history, the written and oral versions, the recognized history of art with a capital "A" and the "lesser" history of folk art unfurled in a fresco juxtaposing humour and irony coupled with a formidable critical force. In the same lineage, Girard presented her scathing piece Filles du roi/Filles de joie as part of the group exhibition "We come in peace..." Histories of the Americas, held here at the Musée in the summer of 2004.

Cynthia Girard was born in 1969 and is a graduate of the Université du Québec à Montréal and Goldsmiths College, University of London. The artist lives and works in Montréal, where she is engaged in the visual arts as well as writing. In the space of under 10 years, she has carved out a place in the new Québec painting through both her incisive style and her subject matter. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Québec and beyond (Paris, London, New York), and has published several collections of poetry.