Carlos Ste-Marie

The Moose/L’orignal

«A moose has come out the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms, rather in the middle of the road. It approaches; it sniffs atthe bus’s hot hood.»This famous stanza from Elizabeth Bishop’s legendary elegiac poem The Moose (1977), —- a poem engaging with the memory of the body, family connections, personal and collective mythologies —- has inspired my recent works and the painting I have imagined andcreated for this particular venue. My work questions the realms of alterity and reality. Narratives ofpower, textures and colours, techniques and pictural traditions are key elements inmy explorations of hallucinations, events, facts. They operate and take place on many levels of storytelling, often mirroring oneanother. Questions such as«who»or«what» defines what is«stranger» or/and the «stranger», their locations and how they illuminate the material reality of art, are prevalent. By humbly following Bishop’s example inL’orignal/The Moose, the theme Stranger than Fiction becomes indeed a habitat for the poetics of the everyday world