Jacinthe Robillard is from Laval, Quebec, a northern suburb of Montreal. Her academic background includes a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts in photography from Concordia University. Robillard’s photographic works have gained awards including The Dora Morrow Fellowship for Excellent Achievement in Visual Arts. Robillard`s photographs are a response to the set of four oil paintings by Dutch painter John Verelst entitled The Four Indian Kings. In her series, Robillard chose to work with four children from Les Habitations Mentana, an impoverished neighbourhood in Montréal’s Plateau Mont-Royal district. These works are a continuation of her series Mentana’s Garden, exhibited at Dare-Dare, an artist run centre in Montreal. The artist chose to depict these four children in their own environment, a low housing community project made up of a diverse network of immigrant cultures and ethnicities. Robillard has carefully chosen to portray these children as leaders and representatives of their community, much in the same way the Four Iroquois sachems represented the Iroquois confederacy in England in 1710. She bestowed them each with an object of significance and their own red cape. These attributes mirror the tactics used to denote the important status and rank of the Four Indian Kings in Verelst’s paintings. Robillard’s images are meant to serve as a visual form of empowerment for the community of Les Habitations Mentana and its children. Les Jardins Mentana, when juxtaposed with the Four Indian Kings, provides a dialogue between historical and contemporary figures.

Sarah Wilkinson