PARCOURS PHOTO SHERBROOKE 2023-2024

The Parcours Photo Sherbrooke is on view from September 2023 to September 2024 along the walking path around Lac-des-Nations.
Admission is free of charge at all times.

CROSSED RESIDENCIES: ARTISTS IN THE COLLECTIONS
Parcours Photo Sherbrooke is a major cultural and tourism event dedicated to promoting photography in the Eastern Townships. It is the initiative of regional photography enthusiasts in collaboration with Destination Sherbrooke, the City of Sherbrooke, the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke, the Club photo de Sherbrooke and the Comité Arts et Culture Jacques-Cartier. The City thanks the organizing committee, made up of the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke and the Comité Arts et Culture Jacques-Cartier.

For the 2023-24 edition of Parcours Photo Sherbrooke, the City of Sherbrooke and the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke proposed to professional photographers that they work with one of the museum collections found in the city. The Musée d’histoire de Sherbrooke (MHist), the Musée de la nature et des sciences de Sherbrooke (MNS²) and the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke (MBAS) opened their doors to artists to enable them to work with objects in their collections. How are these artefacts preserved? What kind of heritage does each of these institutions preserve? How can an archival document, an artwork or a biological specimen be reinterpreted or read in a new way artistically?

Explore the work made by Karine Dezainde (MBAS) and René Bolduc and Geneviève Marois-Lefebvre (MHist) during their micro-residency in the collections of these institutions. History, the natural sciences and the fine arts join forces to provide the public with a unique experience where disciplines meet.

Curators: Miguel St-Laurent and Frédérique Renaud

 

KARINE DEZAINDE

Artistic project
For Karine Dezainde, the museum is an ecosystem cohabited by space, the artworks and the people who care for them. The series of photographs Dezainde has created during her residencies at the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke are imbued with the spirit of the site and open the door to the institution’s back rooms. Her slightly blurred snapshots provide glimpses of employees at work in the midst of setting up an exhibition. Her pictures capture the transitory nature of the artworks which reside at the Musée for a few months. These fleeting moments take place alongside objects in the collections which, on the contrary, have inhabited this space without interruption since 1996.

Using an augmented reality application, Dezainde introduces organic motifs into scenes captured in the space of the museum. In this way, the nature found in the park is incorporated into the ecosystem of the Musée.

The artist thanks Manif d’art and Entente de développement culturel de la Ville de Québec for their financial support of this project.

Biography
Karine Dezainde was born in Sherbrooke and now lives and works in Quebec City, where she teaches at the Garneau CEGEP. She holds a master’s degree in visual art and in teaching art at the CEGEP level. Karine Dezainde uses augmented reality in her printing and photography practice, where it becomes a technical means for interacting with the public and for animating the image. She has taken part in numerous exhibitions and residencies at the Engramme centre for printmaking and dissemination in Quebec City.

 

GENEVIÈVE MAROIS-LEFEBVRE

Artistic project
In her work Geneviève Marois-Lefebvre examines the image in the context of installations, video and assemblages. During her residency, she worked with the abundant collection of private journals and correspondence in the Musée d’histoire de Sherbrooke. There one can find a variety of intermingled periods and voices recounting the reality of individuals in the Eastern Townships region. In this project the artist explored the way in which people convey in words their experience of reality and enter into relations with others through stories. Through the assemblage of these found textual fragments and photographs taken from her everyday life, Marois-Lefebvre brings her own subjectivity to that of her topic. Her photographs become connected to the archival texts to provide new ways of reading, blurring the boundaries between periods and between the real and the imaginary.^[1]

Biography
Geneviève Marois-Lefebvre is a multidisciplinary artist residing in Frelighsburg in the Eastern Townships. She holds a master’s degree in visual and media art from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her work has been exhibited at several venues in the province, including at Atoll Art Actuel, the Centre des arts actuels Skol and the Caravansérail artist-run centre.

^[1] Note that the texts have been transcribed faithfully, including possible errors in the original.

 

RENÉ BOLDUC

Artistic project
The enigmatic images captured by René Bolduc during his micro-residency at the Musée de la nature et des sciences de Sherbrooke lie at the boundary between an artistic and a scientific project. Bolduc has restored life to stuffed specimens by staging them in a studio in a way which makes them appear as if they had been shot in nature. The bestiary he employs blurs the boundaries of time, like in a curiosity cabinet, an icon of the nineteenth century. To some, the animals appear to be caught live, in the midst of conversation. The ancient wet collodion process used by the artist is laborious, however, and several minutes are needed to record the image on the support. The subject must thus be completely immobile – or, even better, stuffed!

Biography
A specialist in bygone photographic technology and processes, René Bolduc is interested in the evocative power of the image and its history. He holds a CEGEP diploma in photography and mechanical photography. His work has been shown at the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke, the Centre culturel Yvonne L. Bombardier in Valcourt, the Musée populaire de la photographie in Drummondville and numerous other venues in Quebec.