Poglus; Yända'tsa’
Alexis Gros-Louis
From March 07th to April 20th 2025
Opening: March 07th at 17h
In Spring 2025 at Ahkwayaonhkeh, Alexis Gros-Louis will present visitors with an enigmatic conceptual and minimalist experience. Essentially, he has covered the entire gallery floor with tiled terracotta ceramics and attached to the wall a photograph of a plant. The viewer has no choice but to tread on the work, this clay being the material for part of his sculptural-architectural device, to get close to the image. So, from walking on Yända'tsa' to seeing the Poglus, a medicinal plant used by the Wendat people, namely.
Gros-Louis' economy of means, the invisibility of the production stages and the paucity of information put into an environment, bring back to the forefront of the art scene the very conceptual and minimal art put forward in the 1960s. Just as in the days of the “dematerialization of the art”, seventy years on, there's a need for art critics to speak out and explain their work. What a far cry from the civilizational visual lyricism of clay pottery, or of an herb with immune-boosting properties, two worlds of Wendat customary use. Gros-Louis's enigmatic mode of demonstration conceals a reference to “enwilding” knowledge, know-how and even how-to-live-together, and questions about the standardized evolution of our societies. Poglus. Yända'tsa', would liberate a style beyond any archaeological, anthropological or historical control, because it is the order of today's indigenous art.
Land as material
The formal interstice between the lines of the tiles and the material that is the clay terracotta (Terra Cota) covering the contemporary floor becomes ceramic. Paradoxically, this minimal formal and material facture is enlarged to consider not only customary motifs as updated forms of indigenous art, but above all the awareness that goes with them, particularly in terms of social and cultural movements such as green art, ecological art and even the revitalization of indigenous languages. What I call grids and incised fringes.
In my view as a Wendat art critic, this enlarged grid, and the use of this clay could take us back several hundred years. At the time, this style of motif, combining fringed lines with grouped incisions, “signed” the identity of Wendat customary uses and even of trade between First Nations and the ornamentation of modes of communication with non-natives. These motifs were found on clay pottery, ribbon skirts, certain scarification (tattoos), on tanned deer and caribou hides, some of which were used as bindings for the first Wendat-French grammars and dictionaries, among Jesuit missionaries.
1 
2For a long time, the subject of study and discussion by the Other, the archaeologist, anthropologist, botanist, pharmacist and historian conscripted into the hiding places of material culture as a bygone past, here they are revived in a barely perceptible way beneath the functional and standardized erasure of an art space by an artistic vision. If we conceive the clay floor tiles as an enlargement of the grids, a related texture named by a word in the Wendat language (Yända'tsa') emerges in the gallery as both a duty to remember and a duty to preserve indigenous types of knowledge and know-how. In keeping with Gros-Louis's minimalist approach, the insertion of a single word participates, as many native artists have done over the past half-century, in the current movement to revitalize native languages, including Wendat, which has been dormant for a century. The image of a Poglus stem, for its part, introduces us to the precariousness of the world of native herbal medicine against the dangers of erasure and eradication, symbolically underlined, for instance, by the obligation to trample on the clay to better see the image.
On the knowledge and proper use of herbal medicine in peril: Poglus
Apart from a few botanists and experts in native herbal medicine, including a few Wendat (Huron), hardly anyone knows about Poglus or Cow Parsnip, on the one hand, and the formal confusion that makes it resemble an invasive and toxic plant, Giant Hogweed, on the other. Resemblance can be a source of misunderstanding, of error even when motivated by good intentions. It's all a question of knowledge and observation, but also of communication between cultures and nations. This is the case for two plants that look alike. Poglus is a common plant in North-East America, with medicinal properties against influenza and other pulmonary viruses. Its use here by the Wendat was recorded in the Florentian. It has been used successfully for prevention on an ongoing basis, as confirmed by several accounts from different eras. Today, Poglus harvesting is seriously endangered. The colonization of the Americas brought not only microbial globalization and colonial wars, but also the invasive and toxic globalization of exotic plants. All these clashes of civilizations have contributed to demographic decline, broken alliances and the acculturation of many features of indigenous civilizations, including plants and the knowledge of natural medicines. This is the case introduced by the image of a simple Gros-Louis stem. Indeed, the introduction in 1990, for horticultural reasons as an ornamental garden plant from south-west Asia, of the Giant Hogweed with its unbelievable resemblance to the Poglus is, by 2025, threatening its extinction. Why should this be? Well, because in 2025, Giant Hogweed is understood to be an invasive perennial plant, toxic both to other plants and to human skin. Its large-scale eradication has become a goal along riverbanks, ditches, railroads, roads, in meadows and wastelands. The disassociation between the two means that the Poglus is almost extinct when harvested by the Wendat in autumn, putting intergenerational transmission at risk.
Leaving the gallery with its minimal modifications by the artist, it is rather with a maximum awareness as a duty of memory and green art that we leave.
1. This is what the 360° virtual exhibition Ahchiouta’a recounts the history of the Huron-Wendat of the St.Lawrence allows you to see at the Musée huron-wendat.
2. Marie-Paule Robitaille, « Les mystères d’un dictionnaire français/wendat », in Nouvelle-France, Histoire et patrimoine, No.2 (Fall 2020), pp. 57-66.
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Guy Sioui Durand
Wendat (Huron) Originally from Wendake, Guy Sioui Durand is a member of the Wolf clan. A sociologist (PH.D.), art critic, independent curator, renowned lecturer and performer, Sioui also creates performative harangues expressing orality. He looks at both Indigenous and contemporary art. On the one hand, he emphasizes the decolonization of minds through the (re)enwilding of our imaginations and the renewal of relationships. On the other, he believes in changing the world through art, and art through living indigenous art, provided that the spectacular is opposed to the spectacle. Independent Commissioner, Guy Sioui Durand has conceived and produced over twenty events and exhibitions of Indigenous and contemporary art since 1994. In 2023, he is participating in the Yandhawa event, an alliance that will lead to the creation of the Wendat Ahkwayahonkeh artist-run center. He is a member of the programming committee. (www.siouidurand.org)
Alexis Gros-Louis is a Wendat artist who combines different techniques to explore the materiality of images and to create a dialogue between objects, spaces, and viewers. He is particularly interested in the notion of normative and dominant cultures. His work has been presented in Quebec, Nova Scotia, Sweden and Germany. He studied at Concordia University and NSCAD University, and is currently pursuing his PhD at Western University.
