Center SAGAMIE invites you to the opening of the exhibition Vers la lumière by Fernande Forest and Mariane Tremblay on Thursday, November 17 at 5:00 pm. This event will be held as part of the Création Duo Diffusion project and will be the third and final duo exhibition in a series of three, throughout the fall of 2022. This duo is presented in partnership with Caravanserail.
Fernande Forest and Mariane Tremblay are root artists. They connect the nocturnal foliage to the year's blooms. Together, they make fields of flowers and wild grasses the place to give colors in the face of disenchantment. These felt landscapes are transfigured by photographic gestures: Fernande Forest creates new floral textures by photomontage, accumulation or pixelation; Mariane Tremblay manipulates several chiaroscuro effects or geometric superimpositions until the image becomes a new place. Photography also meets sculpture, textiles and a participatory aspect with the involvement of the public. In their meticulous montages, spontaneity rubs shoulders with a sensitive observation, so that everything fragile and gleaned from the ground can be turned towards the light.
The artists
Fernande Forest
The plants capture and use all that is near them to bloom. Fernande Forest's practice in photography is similar to this principle. It is in her environment that she draws her subjects, native or cultivated plants, domestic and digital ecosystems... She creates filiations between our relationship to the plant, to the scientist and to our humanity by revealing the real and by magnifying it.
In photography, Forest uses for more than 25 years the digitizer in the way of the photogram. This process led him towards the scientific microscopy where the power of the tools exceeds the marks of the perceptible. It is in this proximity, by plunging into the invisible part of the plants that the artist can measure all the complexity and the refinement. Inspired by the tradition of botanical illustration, she seeks in simplicity to reveal the vital force that is common to us. Recently, Fernande Forest has been working as much with the digital microstructures that make up her images as with the real microstructures revealed by microscopy. These explorations in the digital frame of the photographs reinvent her interpretation of the still life.
Mariane Tremblay
Particularly sensitive to the fabulous strangeness of the variations of perception, Mariane Tremblay experiments in a protean way with the faculty of wonder, the eloquence of visual silence and the potential of the state of solitude of places and objects encountered. With a growing interest in the unfathomable and that which is beyond comprehension, the works resulting from his research explore and capture small and large phenomena of the world, latent or obvious, to detach a new poetry and establish an aesthetic of rarity. Oscillating between the two poles of the contemplative and the rational, his research-creation approach borders on serendipity (the ability to discover without searching), as a relationship to the world resolutely open to the unexpected. His questioning also invariably targets the effects of time and its different forms, as much at the level of the process as at the level of the subject. What is predestined to become a memory, to fall into oblivion or to endure, becomes the raw material for an act of immortalization through art.
Consisting of a wide range of technical processes and significant materials, his bodies of work are declined in installations, sculptures, photographs, drawings and videos, whose ensemble awakens a network of symbolic links where the works respond to each other, like winks.
Biographies
Fernande Forest was born in Bonaventure, Gaspé. She lives and works in Rimouski where she has been practicing visual arts for over 30 years. Her research focuses on the living, particularly on plants. In addition to capturing in reality the vital force that characterizes the living, she has developed a digital language of her own. She creates, from the digital microstructures of her images, original patterns that she describes as "pixelated". This new materiality of the subject comes from the technologies of the image, but it always takes its source in the vegetable world. Fernande Forest has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad, notably at the Musée régional de Rimouski (2022) and at Topo - Centre de création numérique in Montreal (2021) as well as at the Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent (2020). A CALQ and CAC grant holder, she has done several artist residencies and participated in numerous symposiums and in situ events. She conceives works within the framework of the MCCQ's policy of integrating art into architecture and was the subject of an episode in Suzanne Guy's series À tout hasard (ARTV). Involved in the cultural milieu of her region, she is a founding member of Espaces F (Matane) and the independent newspaper Le Mouton Noir. She is a member of the board of directors of cultural organizations.
Mariane Tremblay lives and works in Larouche, between Saguenay and Alma. She holds a master's degree in visual arts and an interdisciplinary bachelor's degree in art from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. Her work in visual arts has been presented and developed over the past decade in solo and group exhibitions, events and creative residencies throughout Quebec and in Colombia. In 2020, the Club de prospection figurée was born, a collective co-founded with artist Magali Baribeau-Marchand, whose first opus explores poetic relationships through the ideas of affective forest and perceptive acuity leading to a renewed imaginary of nature. Taking a liking to co-creation, she multiplies the opportunities to work in duo with other artists on projects that are satellite to her personal artistic research. In addition to her studio practice, she collaborates graphically or in words to various editions published in Quebec, France and Germany.
An essay by Claire Moeder was written especially for Vers la lumière.
Claire Moeder is an author. As a curator and art critic, she has published in the magazines Spirale, Ciel variable and Vie des arts and has led several exhibition projects in Quebec. Her turn towards literature and recent residencies have led her to write from the coastline in Gaspésie and the Magdalen Islands under an ecofeminist consideration of the territory. She is currently working on her first poetry manuscript.
