Izabelle Desroches
Quebec
Born in 1997, Izabelle Desroches is an artist who lives and works in Quebec City. Her pluridisciplinary practice deploys various mediums: photography, performance, installation or publishing. She creates works that highlight modes of encounter and sharing. The accompanying creative process can be carried out in a direct manner, through the encounter with the other; or in an indirect one, through the encounter with fragments of the other by way of the archive. In her projects, the artistic creation mechanisms are as important as the result. Her works are presented in a form that lies somewhere between the blog and a diary. Over the last two years, Izabelle’s work and personal life have been marked by several trips, notably to France, Belgium, Bolivia and Turkey. For her, travelling is a means to mobilize encounters, particularly given that several of her projects directly involve the public.
In 2022, she received a mentorship grant from Quebec City's Première Ovation program to work on a book-model project with the artist Stéfanie Tremblay. It is this project that is now the focus of her SAGAMIE residency. Using both text and photos, Izabelle here revisits the archives she has built up over the course of her projects. By linking her personal writings and photos with anonymous images gleaned from various sources, she seeks to create a place where her personal stories and those of others can encounter each other.
Nathalie Lavoie
Saguenay
From her ancestral home-workshop in a rural and woodland setting, and thanks to the residencies she has carried out in the Saguenay region, Nathalie Lavoie embraces the immediacy of an unfolding creative act to cultivate modes of attention and sensitivity to living matter. Over the course of the past five years, her garden has become a space of inspiration and exploration, as well as a source of vegetable material for her drawing and modelling practice. Moreover, the last two growing seasons provided a timeframe for nocturnal photography sessions. In order to enhance the results, she made use of a translucid tinted tracing to foreground the space she is interested in. This recent approach, which is at the core of her micro-publishing residency, is accompanied by haikus and coloured pencil drawings.
Nathalie Lavoie holds an MFA. Her work has been shown in a number of solo exhibitions in Toronto, Ottawa, Gatineau, Montréal, Lévis, the Côte-Nord, and Saguenay, as well as in group exhibitions in Canada, France, Germany and Chili, notably at Humboldt University in Berlin (2017). Artistic residencies in various places have enabled her to pursue her practice abroad. In 2019, the work Cerveau-feuille was chosen as the cover of the Scotland-based international publication becoming-Botanical. Moreover, in 2022, she was a finalist in the Talents contemporains competition of the Fondation François Schneider (France). Nathalie Lavoie is the recipient of research-creation grants from the Canada Council and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
