Christine Major
"Christine Major" by Christine Redfern, Summer 2007, p. 90
Donna Haraway, Jane Goodall, Temple Grandin and Emily Carr are the unseen subjects of the Montreal artist Christine Major’s latest paintings. The thread uniting all four works, exhibited under the title “Les Jardins d’Éden,” is each woman’s work with animals. Major takes advantage of the fact that we are familiar with these figures, so she has the freedom to explore their ideas in paint using a kind of shorthand. The series expands on the interest in animals evident in Major’s 2004–05 exhibition “Vivarium” at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal.
The painting Le Jardin d’Éden de Donna Haraway takes as its inspiration Haraway’s book The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. The book presents the dog-human relationship as far more significant and rich than that relative newcomer, the human-machine relationship, previously covered by Haraway in her seminal paper “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Major’s painting shows a young woman from the 1960s holding a leash and leading her German shepherd over a hurdle. The surroundings have been romanticized, with the leaves on the trees bringing to mind the landscapes of Henri Rousseau.
Le Jardin d’Éden de Jane Goodall focuses on the moment Goodall and a chimpanzee touch hands. The work references a famous picture of Goodall from National Geographic, which in turn brings to mind Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Le Jardin d’Éden d’Emily Carr is inspired by Carr’s life in the woods and the menagerie of animals she kept around her. A gorilla is in the foreground, looking at a scene bathed in warm pink. Major comments, “In the beginning, I was thinking of something very sexual. Her work, with all its totems and trees, is very phallic. It is not obvious, but I wanted to fetishize the background and, as much as possible, the subject of Emily Carr.”
The final painting focuses on an invention by the animal scientist Temple Grandin, who develops humane equipment for the agricultural industry. Major’s painting depicts her best-known and most widely adopted design: the curved corral that reduces an animal’s stress level while being led to slaughter. Grandin, who lives with high-functioning autism, puts herself in the animals’ enclosures to sense how they feel. In Major’s Le Jardin d’Éden de Temple Grandin, we too assume the cattle’s viewpoint, walking headfirst to the slaughterhouse.
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