Chloé Lefebvre
Annie Descôteaux

Microbourses : artist talk (1/2)
06.01.2021

It is with great pleasure that we at CLARK invite you to attend our upcoming presentations by the four recipients of our Micro-grant programme. This initiative, brought forward by members of CLARK’s programming committee, was aimed at supporting artistic research and creation during the pandemic, while our regular activities were on hold. After spending the past few months in the studio, the selected artists will share their current research with the public, who is invited to join in on the conversation.

This first presentation, animated by CLARK’s cultural mediator Prakash Krishnan, will feature Chloé Lefebvre and Annie Descôteaux. The second will take place on June 8th, with artists Marjolaine Bourdua and Lucie Rocher (more info here).

Chloé Lefebvre

Bio:

Chloé Lefebvre’s art practice is marked by her images’ poetic power and sense of derision. Her multidisciplinary and protean practice brings together the emergent conditions of paradoxical situations that question the oppressions beneath the expression of cultural and political correctness. Oscillating between resilience and resistance, she transforms the banality of everyday objects to reveal the social tensions that affect and test our bodies. Chloé Lefebvre is a member of the Centre d’art et de diffusion CLARK. She holds a master’s degree in visual and media art from UQAM. Her work has been presented in numerous art centres, museums, symposiums, and international festivals across Canada and abroad.*

Project:

Over the past few years, I have scarified plants in the interest of seeing how their scars develop, both visually and conceptually. This series reveals feelings of ambiguity between environmental, emotional, and psychological distress. During the pandemic, I rerouted my desire to escape into the woods into creating ceramic mushrooms. In parallel, the microgrant allowed me to use Atelier CLARK to create a new body of fungal forms and several boxes-plinths-lakes-mirrors as display units to reflect and broaden their presentation as a whole on walls and beyond. These new consolation objects decontaminate the mental space of fear and compost my limiting thoughts. On the periphery of the void, the shapes emerge from the walls of my unconscious. What was hidden now rises to the surface, and I welcome these fruits as trophies from my lost wild childhood and the revenge of the living within an installation ritual.

Annie Descôteaux

Bio:

Annie Descôteaux creates collage-like assemblages that juxtaposes sculptures with hand-made or found weavings that are both serious and humorous in nature. Her work is an attempt to understand the material environment she lives in by bringing together different conceptual objectives with her own personal experiences. Descôteaux holds a BFA and MFA from Concordia University and has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Québec, the UK, Paris, Brussels and in Brooklyn, NY, as well as several group exhibitions and cultural events. Her first book of writings will be published in the summer of 2021 by Éditions Le Laps.

Project:

I am currently working in collaboration with artist Sophia Borowska to produce jacquard woven textile works. I approach jacquard as a sculptor intent on exploiting its three-dimensional potential by incorporating a considerable amount of texture, material, and colour. In an effort to push beyond the exhibition conventions that are usually associated with textile art, I will integrate my weavings with wood-based elements that evoke furniture and architecture. These forms will interact with the woven material through strategic positioning. References to certain key figures from modernity, such as Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier, will be part of the discourse around the final work.

Centre CLARK’s 2021 cultural mediation program, which includes this talk, is supported by Ubisoft, Business/Arts, and Canadian Heritage.