COME AND GET IT
Artist makes himself available for Mother Nature
Stefan St-Laurent’s latest art project — covering himself in foodstuff — might just take the cake this Nuit Blanche.
The only moment of danger that Stefan St-Laurent had with an animal while visiting Bali was when he walked into his rented kitchen to discover a five-foot-long spitting cobra.
The deadly snakes spit venom, St-Laurent knew, so “I told myself to be calm, to not show fear, to just walk slowly backwards, and it left me alone. It left.”
Otherwise, his interactions with animals during his six-month visit to the Indonesian island went off without a scratch (literally), which is remarkable considering what he was doing: St-Laurent, an Ottawa artist and curator, was covering his naked body with food and inviting all sorts of creatures — insects, stray dogs, even fish — to use him as a dinner table.
The project will be seen in two locations during Nuit Blanche Ottawa-Gatineau on Saturday, and will surely be among the most extraordinary of more than 100 performances and exhibitions that make up the overnight festival. At AXNÉO7 (80 rue Hanson in Gatineau), St-Laurent has photographs, video and mixed-media works that include images of him feeding wildlife, and other works he’s created.
Meanwhile, in the courtyard of SAW Gallery (where Stefan was director until his identical twin brother Jason assumed the job last year), St-Laurent will screen a video of himself covered in catnip, much to the delight of two “adorable and excitable Persian cats.”
It happens that two cats, Dief and Baker, have the run of Big Beat Central, and when there’s catnip about things can get ugly fast, like a Senate committee feeding on one of its own. I ask St-Laurent, while offering your catnip-covered self to the cats, did you protect your eyes and nether parts?
No need, he says, the cats were thrilled, as viewers will see in the video when it’s looped on a screen in the SAW courtyard for the duration of Nuit Blanche. “It’s almost like a party for three,” he says.
The project began last autumn when St-Laurent, with a grant from the Ontario Arts Council in hand, left for Bali to complete what began as a video project. The “Please Feed the Animals” idea appealed to him as a positive way to lead people to reconsider our human relationship with other animals.
“I wanted to do a project that was very positive, where I wasn’t being judgmental or chastising people about animal welfare,” St-Laurent says. “I wanted to do these more poetic works that would maybe enable people to imagine other types of relationships they could have with animals,” he says, whether it’s “possible to intervene in the animal kingdom in a way that is ethically correct, to give something to animals without taking anything from them in return?”
He found one way. “I covered my body in different foods for wild animals to eat, as if I myself were a religious offering.”
He covered himself with tropical flowers and was swarmed by newborn butterflies and moths. He covered himself with mango leaves to attract praying mantises. A photograph shows the six-inch-long insects crawling over St-Laurent, who lies on the forest floor and is covered in green leaves. The bugs seem happy and why not? These are their salad days.
He dove into the sea and was swarmed by hundreds of sunfish, eager to eat the pieces of bread attached to his body. He covered himself in dog food and offered his bodily buffet to the street dogs of Bali — but only two dogs. “If they were more they would probably start fighting, because there’s always an alpha male,” he says.
It sounds dangerous, but St-Laurent says “nothing went wrong. I never got bit, I never had any accidents with animals. It was almost like they knew I didn’t mean them any harm.” It may also sound disgusting to some readers, but I can hear the true pleasure in St-Laurent’s voice as he says, “I wasn’t grossed out at all. I was happy. It’s blissful for me to do it.”
At AXNÉO7 he’s also created what he calls “a painting for butterflies.” He carved his body shape out of a form and has fresh flowers growing in that shape. It’s a rebuttal to a project in which British artist Damien Hirst attracted butterflies to wet canvases, where they became stuck and died. “The work I made here is sort of a reverse Hirst,” he says, “a painting to feed butterflies.”
He made the catnip video when he returned to Canada, specifically for Nuit Blanche.
“I wanted to do something more fun for Nuit Blanche,” he says. “This is like an all-night party, the atmosphere is quite different in how people receive the works. I thought of doing a tongue-in-cheek work like this one, where I’m giving ‘drugs’ to cats to have a good time, and to show that during Nuit Blanche, where people are revelling all night long and partying, and probably doing various types of drugs.”