Patrick Bérubé at Musée d'art de Joliette with (Ce)pendant [(Now)ever]

Musée d'art de Joliette presents Patrick Bérubé (Ce)pendant, [(Now)ever], curated by Marianne Cloutier, through September 7, 2026.

A ruin is supposed to be finished, something that happened once and now only waits to be studied. Here, that assumption does not hold. The floor has been cut into openings, and inside them something is still, quietly, growing.

Mycelium does not care about the difference between decay and construction. It threads through what has already fallen apart to build something that was not there before.

A room built around that logic asks what the present looks like if it is not inherited intact, but still being assembled out of what came before it.

Nothing here has finished happening. The ruin and the seedbed turn out to be the same shape, just viewed at different speeds.

Patrick Bérubé's first solo museum exhibition occupies a single room, painted white and carpeted in a dusty, almost skin-toned pink.

Patrick Bérubé

Patrick Bérubépatrick

Square sections of the floor are cut away and sunk below the surface, each holding sand or soil, a length of copper pipe, and a small object, bronze, mycelium, or both.

The layout borrows its restraint from the Japanese tea room, where every gesture is reduced until it carries weight. Nothing shouts. Everything asks to be approached the way one approaches an excavation site, from above.

The piece that gives the show its title occupies six sunken squares, connected by copper conduit like exposed plumbing or a root system. In one hollow, a small bronze form sits alone in sand. In another, a block of raw mycelium, still bearing the shape of the mould it grew in, balances on a knuckle of pitted stone. 

Bérubé lets each material keep its own logic, so a viewer above the openings is not reading symbols so much as watching materials continue to shift, settle, and take form.

Nearby, a length of Jacquard weaving from At the root of... holds the palest ghost of an image in its pink and cream ground, dyed with a wild mushroom.

Look long enough and a branching shape surfaces from the weave, something between a tree and a nervous system, texture up close and only a picture from a distance.

Adaptation is the plainest gesture and maybe the sharpest. House slippers made from mycelium leather, left on a floor tile of embossed paper, worn and softened at the heel, as if waiting for someone to step in and, by extension, into the tea room's ritual of removing one's shoes. Nobody does. The slippers stay empty, an argument in themselves.

The exhibition is framed through a citation from Byung-Chul Han, who describes today’s crisis of community as a crisis of resonance, an echo chamber where a person mostly hears themselves. 

Bérubé does not illustrate that idea. He builds a counter space for it instead, where growing mycelium takes months and casting bronze cannot be rushed. In a moment when most images move faster than anyone can think about them, a room organized around fungal time reads less like nostalgia than a working alternative.

Bérubé's practice, across the trilogy this exhibition belongs to, keeps returning to one argument in different materials, heritage is not a fixed layer underneath the present, it is still active, still metabolizing.

The mycelium in the sunken floor will keep changing after the show closes, drying, perhaps cracking, refusing to hold still for a wall label. That is what an archaeology of now might actually look like, a room that keeps composting itself in real time.

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