August Happy Hours
Meet the artists Rachel Echenberg and Maryse Arseneault
Wednesday, August 28 at 5 p.m.
Whether you are a member, an art lover or simply curious, you are all invited to this festive event!
In a relaxed atmosphere, Maryse Arseneault and Rachel Echenberg will present their current creative projects. The evening will be followed by a potluck cocktail, everyone brings a dish to share, if they wish and enjoys the double program. Children are welcome.
Rachel Echenberg
UNMEASURABLE
Unmeasurable is a photo series begun during an artist residency with my family on Anticosti Island in 2018. In the vast and isolated spaces of the island, we were able to create daily actions that connected our physical experiences to geographic proximity and distance, allowing me to use the relationships themselves as a measure of space. The images explore the structures and weights of dependence.
This summer, for the 10e Rencontres de la photographies en Gaspésie a selection of these photographs is exhibited in outdoor locations in Percé and Île Bonaventure. On these sites, the images are returned to another, somewhat similar landscape on the edge of the Gulf of the St. Lawrence.
Rachel Echenberg is a visual artist who primarily works in performance and video. Echenberg’s continual interest in possibilities for active empathy has lead to artworks that highlight vulnerable, intimate and uncontrollable relationships. Since 1992 Rachel Echenberg’s work has been exhibited, performed and screened across Canada as well as internationally in Belgium, Chile, Czech Republic, England, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Morocco, Northern Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland and the United States. Many of her videos are distributed through Vidéographe in Montreal and Vtape in Toronto. Echenberg holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada (1993) and an MA in Visual Performance from Dartington College of Arts in the UK (2004). Rachel Echenberg currently teaches in the Fine Arts Department of Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec.
Maryse Arseneault
LE GRAND VERRE
“Above the conifers is a large glass plate that sprawl, preventing us from flying away”
(song extract, Maryse Arseneault 2005, free translation from French)
I approach Le grand verre as a laboratory combining drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture and performance to explore the intrinsic memory of matter and the performativity of objects; among other things the glove, life jacket and fan.
My artistic concerns are based on the repetitive accumulation and mnemonic potential of action art. In a multidisciplinary context, I examine ancestral memory, animism and our relationship to the environment. With contemplative sensitivity, I try to understand the non-human being and the non-living object as active ingredients, sources of knowledge and creative potential.
Le grand verre is a poetic continuation of L’art de s’envoler / Flyer for Flight, an ongoing research project on which I have been working since 2013, inspired by childhood dreams where I learned to fly. If humans had spent less time creating planes, would our desire to fly have showed itself differently? Have we developed the ability to fly in our bodies? How to face your own lightness and fear of disappearing?
Maryse Arseneault loves the wind in the leaves, the brittle ice and the sailor songs. She holds a master’s degree from Concordia University (MFA Studio Arts 2015), and continues to work as multidisciplinary artist from Montreal. Acadian from Moncton, she has been presenting her work in a professional context since 2005, notably at Galerie Sans Nom (2012), Eastern Edge Gallery (2013) and Galerie du Nouvel Ontario (2015). In 2018, she became involved in several projects, including a first curatorial essay presented at the Galerie d’art Louise-et-Ruben-Cohen of the Université de Moncton, as well as a participation in the CONTACT festival in Toronto. This year, she is receiving a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for her research project L’art de s’envol / Flyer for Flight. By combining an ecological way of thinking with the desire to reconnect with nature, she continues her artistic interventions, including performance, drawing and video.
Images
Banner : Rachel Echenberg, Perimetre, 2018 et Maryse Arseneault, detail from Le grand verre, 2019.