Florence Viau – Albert-Dumouchel Award Winner

The Prix Albert-Dumouchel for emerging artists fosters the emergence of new practices in the printed arts by celebrating the boldness and quality of research by emerging artists.
It is open to students enrolled in undergraduate visual arts or related programs whose practice is related to the printed arts. In collaboration with Arprim, L’imprimerie offers the winning artist a three-month residency, including 24/7 access to the workshops.

Photo credit: Laurent Le Bel-Roux

Biography

Florence Viau is a visual artist working mainly in sculpture, painting and printmaking. Her approach is characterized by a correspondence to anthropological practices in order to question our relationship to the image. She is interested in themes such as nature, memory and language, as well as the technologies that can preserve them. Through the use of détournement, transposition and associations, she seeks to create a dialogue between different temporalities, where systems of representation meet and bear witness to the relationship between humans and the environment. Drawing inspiration from the archaeological and digital worlds, she develops a reflection on transmission, where the landscape manifests itself through time.

In 2021, she completes a bachelor’s degree in visual and media arts at UQAM. During this period, she will participate in the À l’affiche project in collaboration with Arprim. Florence will begin her MFA in Sculpture at Concordia University in fall 2023.

Project presentation

Adopting an attitude of exploration, I navigate through my personal photographic archives to draw out elements marked by a computerized translation, a decoding of reality. Different materials, luminous and chromatic phenomena become carriers of visual corruptions, through the filter of cameras, which I exploit to create sculptural images. This pictorial research is the premise of all my projects.

Thanks to the residency at L’imprimerie, an unfinished work of sculptural origin, created as part of my bachelor’s degree, will find its finality. The materiality of the image makes its way from photography to sculpture to intaglio. Through the parameters of photogravure, I’ll be able to construct several iterations of the same image.

At the same time, a second line of research is taking place in my current work on fireworks. These luminous phenomena allow me to tackle questions linked to ecology, archaeoastronomy and entertainment technologies. New avenues may be explored during my residency, based on my documentation of the 2022 International des Feux Loto-Québec.

Crédit photo: Florence Viau

© L’imprimerie, centre d’artistes, 2024