Catherine Tremblay
Saguenay
Originally from Saguenay, Catherine Tremblay studied and worked in Montreal from 2004 to 2024, where she taught photography, video, and graphic design at the college level. She is now a professor of photography and media arts at UQAC.
She holds a MFA in Visual and Media Arts from UQAM, a BFA from Concordia University, and also studied graphic design at UQAM. Since 2015, she has been the production director at the Rencontres internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie. She has completed several research and creative residencies in France and various regions of Quebec. Since 2005, her work has received awards and been presented in numerous exhibitions in Quebec and internationally, in France, Switzerland, Mauritania, and New York.
At once poetic and critical, her approach explores the relationships between nature and image, between perception and sensory matter. By experimenting with analogue and alternative processes, she questions the ways in which images are produced and the conditions under which they are received, all the while seeking to renew our view of living things.
Fascinated by the landscapes and beings that shape her daily life, she envisions personal and shared territories as narrative and symbolic spaces. By collecting and recomposing these fragments, she introduces shifts between the subject and its referent, questioning the materiality of the image and our aesthetic experience.
As part of this artist residency, she is developing a micro-publication envisioned as a space for experimentation. Using altered negatives and repurposed chromatic processes, she works on the selection, transformation and interconnection of photographs as a process in its own right. The pages become a territory of attention where rhythm, paper and assembly structure the reading experience while accompanying their drifts.
Claudia Bernal
Montreal
Claudia Bernal is an interdisciplinary artist of Colombian origin whose practice intersects the visual arts, performance theatre and literature. Her work explores the relationships between the body, territory, migration and identity, in an approach that mobilizes art as a mode of action and resistance. Her multidisciplinary practice combines sculptures, engravings, photographs, drawings and various objects, often incorporated into performance installations.
She holds a PhD in arts research and practice from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in research-creation at the Centre de recherche Cultures – Arts – Sociétés (UQAC) in 2023. Her training in the fine arts, theatre and philology informs an approach in which text, gesture and materiality are mobilized as languages in the visual and performance arts fields. Her interdisciplinary works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and internationally, in museums, artist-run centres, galleries, theatres, and public spaces.
For her micro-publishing residency she will turn to the artist's book medium to advance and expand her research into the body-territory. She will draw on a selection of photographs taken during a residency at La naturaleza del paisaje, an artist centre in Toledo (Spain), and will aim to transpose her performative explorations of the territory into the object/book. Bernal considers the printed object as a space for interdisciplinary creation, where photographic images, text and performance can come together. A lecturer in the Department of Arts, Literature and Languages at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Claudia Bernal lives between Montreal, Bogotá and Chicoutimi.
A launch for Catherine Tremblay and Claudia Bernal's micro-editions will take place at the Centre CLARK in Montreal, followed by another at La Galerie L'Œuvre de L'Autre in Chicoutimi.
