Rencontres mobiles

Sophie Castonguay

Sophie Castonguay studies the subjectivation of gazes and cultural conditioning. She creates devices using the voice of the artist as an outside voice for the piece. Using narrative modes she attempts to create interference in the reception of the work and forces the spectator to question their position. Her work has been shown in Europe (Paris, Cologne, Basel) and in Quebec (L’œil de Poisson, Axe Néo-7, La Centrale, Dare-Dare, Dazibao). She holds a master’s degree in creation from UQÀM’s École des arts visuels et médiatiques (2007). She’s teacher at the University of Québec at Montréal.

Artist website

doux soft club

The doux soft club is a collective of artists-curators that brings together the converging reflexive and creative approaches of Pénélope & Chloë, Mariane Stratis and Marion Paquette. The poetic and sculptural aspects of their respective practices is at the heart of their collaboration. Pursuing an aesthetic of softness, the collective foregrounds themes connected to the imperatives of sensation. For these artists, imagining the “doux-soft” hinges on the capacity to see the marvellous in the banal. This approach, which hews closely to the worlds in which each member moves in, favours the emergence of a poetry of the everyday. It’s in this way that their performative work could be said to breathe life into a range of sculptural objects, revealing both their sensed and sensuous natures.

Pénélope et Chloé website 

Mariane Stratis website

Marion Paquette website

Lagueux & L’Ecuyer

Stéphanie Lagueux and Jonathan L’Écuyer are media artists who have worked collaboratively for several years, in addition to living together and raising a family. By creating interactive and participatory experiences, they explore public relationships within various presentation contexts. Above all, they seek to stir the viewer’s curiosity and to engage them with their experiments, which highlight the use of common, everyday and recycled objects and substances, from both a metaphorical and material perspective.

Artist website

Laurent Lévesque

Making use of installation, digital technologies, photography and video, Laurent Lévesque sets up apparatuses that engage the visitor in a distorted experience of the landscape. He explores the areas of tension between the natural and the artificial. He is especially interested in our relationship with nature, space and time in the contexts of environmental insecurity, the authority of technology, globalization of markets, and the pervasiveness of the Internet. In his projects, the landscapes act as fragments, organized into complex systems beyond what the gaze can comprehend. Thus, his works are to be approached as vaporous ensembles, as geographies, that build one experience after the other. Through such artifices, concrete spaces are organized into conceptual spaces. Born in Sorel (Quebec, Canada), Laurent Lévesque lives and works in Montreal and, recently, also in Seattle, Washington. His projects, which were presented across Quebec, in Ontario, in France and in Peru have led him to be selected for various residency programs and grants.

Artist website

Mathieu Marcoux

Mathieu Marcoux is an electroacoustic music composer. He studied at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, then in Sweden at the Musikhögskolan in Gothenburg. His creative practice is marked by concrete and spectral musical traditions. It also draws from the universe of psychoanalysis, most notably through a focus on the voice. The privileged place accorded to the voice in listening makes it a rich resource for creating meaningful commotions from acoustic as well as synthetic sounds.

Artist website 

Sonia Paço-Rocchia

Sonia Paço-Rocchia is an improviser, composer, sound artist, installation artist, maker, live coder, live electronics musician. Her work has been presented all over North America and Europe. Sonia Paço-Rocchia’s research is about sounds, timbres, forms ways to communicate the abstract. Composing, she broaden the variety of sonic possibilities either using new techniques, live electronics, invented instruments, found instruments or automated instruments. As for her work on the form, most of her work have a visual/theatrical aspect as well as choices given to the players

Artist website 

Jocelyne Thibault

Jocelyne Thibault is a visual artist who lives and works in Laval. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in visual and media arts from UQAM (2010) and has since dedicated herself to printmaking, sculpture and installation. She was a 2018 finalist for the prize CALQ-Oeuvre de l’année Laval as well a recipient of a 2018–2019 creation grant from CALQ.

Artist website