Title: Meadowvale Glen Estates (2003-2005, No longer on site)


Artist: Anne-Marie Beneteau   Exhibition year: 2003

"...Meadowvale Glen Estates, a site-specific agglomeration of sculptural objects that both evoke and critique the pervasive intrusion of housing developments of middle-class shelter further and further into the quasi-natural world of farmland and beyond into actual natural habitat. The historical razing of the Ontario forests for lumber had at very least been ameliorated by second and even third-growth forests that rose up. But even such second-hand nature is being entirely undone by the economic and social appeal of the single-family dwelling and our need to cluster together in them. Where Francesca Vivenza's Outpost teeters at the edge of an aesthetically abstract (even conceptual) registration of the intrusion and impact of the artefactual upon the natural world, Meadowvale Glen Estates is bluntly representational. Beneteau borrows from the field of animal architecture, wasps, creatures that construct architecturally complex and sophisticated dwellings of paper or even mud that Beneteau admits leave her in awe. Beneteau's habitations are things on a stick: large, roughly shaped spheres, formed from an adobe or mud-like substance mixed with pieces of natural vegetation like dried grasses and small twigs, skewered on the end of a piece of tree branch itself stuck into the ground. Each of the spheres is puckered with small, crater-like entry point. I am home, honey. It’s a colony of a kind, a tightly-knit gathering here in the midst of the meadow. But of its intended inhabitants we know nothing. Like almost any typical suburban subdivision, Meadowvale Glen Estates is isolated and disassociated from its surroundings, and just like such residential neighbor-hoods on virtually any weekday, it is utterly devoid of life. While there may be no place like home, it[s an equation disturbingly distorted as our sense of "place" becomes increasingly disconnected from the idea of "home". Though Beneteau's spheres will no doubt come to be inhabited by some freeloading species never ones to turn their noses up at ready-made lodging, for now they little more than lonely encampment of empty vessels, signifiers, if you will, of how there really is no home like place." 
Gil McElroy, "House and Garden (Some Sheltered Thoughts)," The Tree Museum, (The Tree Museum, 2002-2003)

For over twenty years, Anne-Marie has been producing work about the impact of humans on nature, and vice-versa. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions nationally.