Through a variety of mediums such as painting, sculpture and textiles, Sophia Borowska, Jannick Deslauriers, Ingrid Syage Tremblay and Amélie Proulx explore their relationship to craftsmanship and its multiple possibilities, weaving together the fabric of everyday life.
Drawing inspiration from the domestic and architectural objects that punctuate our common existences, they exploit the evocative power of these familiar elements, highlighting their value and their memorial, ritual, and affective significance, or alternatively diverting them to address the intrusion of the social into the private sphere. Transcending the apparent contingency of the objects they draw inspiration from, they skillfully exalt their unsuspected symbolic richness to provoke varied reflections on the passage of time, memory, loss, presence, absence, and the social fabric that ties us to one another.
Jannick Deslauriers and Sophia Borowska use soft, even translucent textile materials, along with techniques historically associated with the domestic and feminine sphere, to represent urban facades or everyday objects. Their creations exhibit a tension between robustness and delicacy, between the rigor of construction and suppleness, between monumentality and intimacy. Symbolically, they navigate within the affirmation of social construction and its critical deconstruction, through artistic diversion. While Jannick Deslauriers depicts the facades of demolished heritage houses, or objects associated with domestic and school spaces, Sophia Borowska’s tapestries are inspired by the sustainable architecture of Scandinavian cities of Copenhagen and Nykøbing Sjælland, imagining a utopian city by literally weaving an urban fabric. Each fiber, woven together, thus becomes an allegory of community and the social bond.
This dynamic can also be found in Ingrid Syage Tremblay’s work, which is inspired by the movements of industrial marine landscapes and the objects found there, in this case fishing nets. Sculpting directly from a tree trunk, she agilely transforms this rigid material to give it the softness, suppleness, fluidity, and lightness of textile. By using wood, a living material that carries its own temporality and history in its furrows, she symbolically conjugates her intimate narrative with that of nature.
As for Amélie Proulx, her porcelain murals draw inspiration from animal tapestries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Owls and bats move within frescoes adorned with vegetal motifs depicting stylized forest landscapes. In her fairy-tale scenes imbued with poetry, the artist illustrates the biological phenomenon of zoochory, a crucial ecological process by which animals contribute to the natural dispersion of seeds, promoting the reproduction and propagation of plants and trees, and helping to shape the landscapes that surround us.
