Gerard Beaulieu

When the Rubber Meets the Road is the creation of Prince Edward Island artist Gerald Beaulieu. It is on loan to the Andrew & Laura McCain Art Gallery from the Beaverbrook Art Gallery until May 2022. Through his art, the artist calls into question the impact of our contemporary society on nature.

Gerard Beaulieu is an artist who uses familiar materials to examine the boundary between what is natural and manmade, helpful or harmful, always returning to his larger questions about how we live in the world, and what the consequences and compromises might be.

I admire Crows, and other wildlife that adapt to us. They are intelligent and capable of eating a variety of things. It is not uncommon to see crows eating the consequences of our commuting, and roadkill makes a substantial contribution to their diet. As scavengers it is what they do: they clean up a lot of our mess.

By turning our garbage, discarded old tires, into a carrion consuming corvid, that just happen to be the collateral damage of our commuter culture., I hope to have effectively commented on how our habits affect habitat and the creatures that inhabit our shared spaces. [The sculpture] is literally a collision between wildlife and our domestic lives, a theme that I have explored often in the past.

While my treatment of Crows as roadkill may be offensive to our sensibilities, the irony is that dead animals on the side of the road are indicators of healthy wildlife populations. Car windshields are much cleaner these days because there are fewer bugs in the environment to hit. – Gerald Beaulieu.

Read a review about the art from the Sierra Club of Canada.

Listen to music inspired by When the Rubber Meets the Road from the high school project, Sculpture Songs.