revenons en oiseaux, être un arbre est trop dur et aujourd’hui, il neige brings together more than 30 years of practice by Montreal artist Karen Elaine Spencer and leads us on a journey where mourning becomes movement, listening, and attention to the world. The exhibition weaves together armour-like sculptures made of barbed wire and silk, performance video, drawings, clothing, and photographs.

Birds embody the freedom of inhabiting the sky; their songs open an emotional space that transcends our boundaries. In contrast, the tree, which cannot move, symbolizes the vulnerability associated with immobility. Through subtle and nearly invisible gestures, the artist carefully and persistently outlines a quiet resistance, choosing to observe and occupy the margins, the interstitial spaces, and the silence that exists amid everything

Walking, again and again, becomes an act of survival. In the gallery, washed in a celestial blue — the colour of an infinity suspended between presence and absence — a soundtrack guides visitors’ steps, while each lettered cardboard, each preserved orange peel, tells a fragment of shared life. The artist’s phrases — scribbled, whispered, or carried on the body — weave a space where the intimate meets the collective, where speech flows like a bird’s song between two silences.

Like a constellation of memories, the exhibition invites us to slow down, listen, and reflect. It pays tribute to the gentle power of karen elaine spencer, who transforms loss into poetic momentum and opens passages between our inner boundaries and the horizon that hovers above us. Let us come back as birds: let us walk, sing, and inhabit the world differently, both free and vulnerable at once.