Mariane Tremblay
Mariane Tremblay is particularly attuned to the fabulous strangeness of perceptual variations. In a protean manner, she explores the faculty of enchantment, eloquence of visual silence and solitude potential of the places and objects she encounters. Demonstrating an increasing interest for the unfathomable and that which is beyond understanding, the works resulting from her research explore and capture the small and great phenomena of the world, whether latent or evident, to bring out a new poetry and establish an aesthetics of rarity. Alternating between the contemplative and rational poles, her research-creation verges on serendipity (the capacity of discovering without looking), like a resolutely open relation to the unexpected. Made up of broad range of technical processes and significative materials, her body of work variously takes shape in installations, sculptures, photographs, drawings and videos that, viewed as a whole, awakens a network of symbolic links in which the works correspond with one another through knowing glances.
Deeply influenced by the countryside of the Lac Saint Jean region, Mariane Tremblay lives and works between Saguenay and Alma. She holds a BA in interdisciplinary arts and a MFA from Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. Her visual arts work has been presented over the last decade in solo and group exhibitions and as part of events throughout Quebec and in Columbia. In 2020 she cofounded, along with the artist Magali B. Marchand, the collective Club de prospection figurée, the first creation of which surveys the poetic relations inherent in the ideas of an affective forest and a perceptive acuity leading to a renewed and reenchanted imaginary of nature. Having acquired a taste for co-creation, she multiplied the opportunities to do work in duo with other artists by proposing satellite projects to her artistic practice. Alongside her studio work, she contributes, either as a graphic artist or writer, to various publications put out in Quebec, France and Germany.
Fernande Forest
I work with a pared down aesthetic. My subjects, for the most part native plants, appear to float on surfaces that are often black. Using image technologies, I recently experimented with the loss of digital image data in my hyperrealist photographs. The only things that remain are colours, signs, symbols, such as fossil traces which connect with the real and renew my interpretation of botany. In short, my photographic work creates filiations between plants, science and our humanity by revealing the real and magnifying it. My works seek, in a tangible way, to bring forth the vital and creative force we share and which drives all living organisms to flourish by evolving thanks to intermixing, risks and renewals that encounters bring about.
Born in Bonaventure in the Gaspésie region, Fernande Forest lives in Rimouski in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region where she has been practising visual arts for over 30 years. Her research is centred on life forms, primarily plants. Since her beginnings as a photographer, she has used the scanner as a macro camera, which has recently led her to make use of scientific microscopy. Trained as a graphic artist with access to a studio of her own, in 2014 she completed an undergraduate course in research-creation. She has presented many solo and group exhibitions in Canada, France and Poland. She participated in symposia and site-specific arts events, among which the Rencontre photographique du Kamouraska. She creates works as part of the integration of arts and architecture policy. In 2019 she was awarded grants from the CALQ and the CCA.
