En Expo New Horizons — Fondation Grantham

Group Exhibition — New Horizons

The New Horizons exhibition took place from November 11 to 26, 2023. It featured works by Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes, Laetitia de Coninck, Julie Desrosiers, Catherine Gagnon, Katia Gagnon and Flavie Goyer-Villeneuve.

New Horizons

Text by Josianne Poirier,
Artistic Director of the Foundation

The exhibition New Horizons offers a window onto the next generation in visual arts. It brings together works by six artists whose practices address environmental issues through a variety of forms and methodologies.

The video installations of Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes, this year’s prizewinner, take the form of virtual ecosystems that allow us to imagine other climate futures. They feature a colourful, lively yet fictive flora and fauna, inspired by the forests of Costa Rica the artist came to know during her childhood. Laetitia de Coninck, for her part, engages her body in an encounter with the plant “other.” Cycle délicat, a series of four long-lasting participatory performances, presented situations of coexistence with milkweed, ground cherries, burdock capitula and zinnias. Performance is also central to the process followed by Julie Desrosiers, who probes the links between the human and the non-human. Using her background in contemporary puppetry, she asks us to develop our empathy with regard to the material.

Through the character of the Illustre Inconnue II, Catherine Gagnon advocates a peripheral visual art, created outside the major urban centres. Several months after she became engaged, she celebrated her marriage to visual art in October 2023. Katia Gagnon, in turn, employs sarcasm as she regularly targets the culture of solo car use. Engines coated with caramelized sugar take on the appearance of candies or jewellery, symbols of the desires that lead to our ruin, and of an industrial age we must get beyond. Offering an unexpected response to these observations, Flavie Goyer-Villeneuve makes walking the crux of her practice. Her works draw their sustenance from hiking, often in the Laurentian forest, as well as from the fleeting memory of the tree that stood in front of the house where she grew up.

The impetus for the exhibition New Horizons is the Visual Arts Prize awarded to a student in one of the visual arts master’s programs offered by six Quebec universities: Concordia University, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Université du Québec à Montréal, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Université du Québec en Outaouais and Université Laval. Each of these institutions supported the candidacy of an artist whose work is being shown here at the Grantham Foundation. For the first edition of the competition, the prize has been awarded to Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes, at Concordia University. She receives a $3,000 grant, thanks to the financial support of the Fonds Pierre-Mantha.

The Grantham Foundation thanks the Fonds Pierre-Mantha and the participating universities, and congratulates the artists!