Frédérique Ulman-Gagné – CUSTOM RESIDENCY
With my research project, I‘d like to narrate stories that are both intimate and collective, too painful to be described through words. Women‘s stories, stories of great violence that we don‘t want to be forced to tell, since they belong to us in all their terror and humiliation. My intention with this pictorial research is to find visual strategies that transform shame into emancipated revolt through the use of printed shapes and colors. Concretely, I‘d like to work first by building up a bank of stories, some of which I only know extracts from, then using them as a poetic springboard for the creation of several series of prints and serigraphs. All in all, this is a project in which I wish to focus on the tension between the dramaturgies of the everyday and the visibilization of the creative process in an iterative perspective. Firmly rooted in a tradition of feminist art history, yet revisited in the light of the singularities of my approach, these subtle and sometimes vertiginous alliances between the macro and micro dimensions of reality become invitations to revisit the chaos and tragedy of everyday life.
I‘ve been fortunate enough to take part in a number of creative residencies focused on screen–printing, which have enabled me to embark on a long–term, multi–chapter project to which I‘d like to contribute once again. Each new section of this research presents a group of objects listed in no particular order and repeated in various configurations. These collections of objects generally symbolize a place or an event. For Notre honte sera une révolte, I‘ll be working with a new group of objects taken from women‘s intimate and collective narratives that I‘ve collected over the course of my research.
I’ll also use the technical assistance of the L’imprimerie to start out learning monotype using oil-based inks. I’m particularly interested in this printmaking technique, which I haven’t yet used. I am seeking a method to work on colored backgrounds that mimic my painterly gestures, so that I can subsequently re-work the surface with oil paint.
Crédit photo: Karen Stentaford
Biography
Frédérique Ulman-Gagné was born in 1982 in Montreal, where she lives and works. She holds a BFA from Concordia University (2007) and an MFA from the University of Québec in Montreal (2010) where she now teaches part-time. Her work has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in Montreal, including Galerie Les Territoires (2012), La Centrale Powerhouse (2013), Dominique Bouffard (2016), Galerie McClure (2017), McBride Contemporain (2020), Galerie Occurrence (2021), Simon Blais (2022) and in several maisons de la culture. The artist has also presented her work in Trois-Rivières at the Presse-Papier workshop (2019), in France at the RDV gallery in Nantes (2014), in Iceland at the SIM Gallery (2013) and in Brooklyn at the NARS Foundation (2018). She has completed several residencies in Reykjavik at Samband Islenska myndlistarmanna (2013), in St-Jean-Port-Joli at Centre Est-Nord-Est (2014), at Atelier Circulaire in Montreal (2015), in Quebec City at Engramme (2017), in Brooklyn at the NARS Foundation (2018) and at the Vermont Studio Center (2019). Her projects have been supported by several grants from the Quebec and Canadian arts councils. Her paintings are part of several private collections. The artist has also completed a number of public art projects for the City of Laval, the City of St-Hubert and the City of Montreal.
Crédit photo: Guy L’heureux
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