“La Voie lactée” (1992) is permanently installed on the roof of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Photo courtesy of MAC
Tackling notions of native language (a “mother tongue”) and the feminine voice, "La Voie lactée” depicts a pair of flame-red lips — those of the artist’s own mother. The photo is permanently installed on a billboard atop the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), so it can only ever be seen at a distance, against an expanse of sky.
“La Voix lactée” (“The Milky Voice”), a second, playfully retitled version, was gifted by the Société de transport de Montréal (STM) to the Paris Métro in 2011. Now, in the form of a glass-tiled mosaic that can be viewed up close and from afar, it adorns a “milk white” tunnel at Saint-Lazare, the city’s second most-frequented subway station.
Cadieux primarily explores the body as a landscape and an interface between public and private realms. She is also concerned with the way art integrates into urban environments. Her 2009 work “Lierre sur Pierre” (“Ivy on Stone”) — an enormous vine of reflective, anodized metal climbing up the side of Concordia’s John Molson School of Business Building (MB) — acts as a comment on the traditional image of academia’s ivy-covered walls.
“La Voix lactée” (2011) on site in the Saint-Lazare Paris Métro station, which plays host to approximately 44 million passers-by per year. | Photo: RATP, Bruno Marguerite, courtesy of Radio Canada