Four female perspectives on the Gaspé Peninsula

Temporary exhibition presented from October 22 to December 15, 2024.

The Musée acadien du Québec (MAQ) is pleased to mark the 15th anniversary of the Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie by presenting the temporary exhibition Four Female Perspectives on the Gaspésie.

The exhibition showcases the work of four international photographers who completed a creative residency in the Gaspé Peninsula. They are Maude Arsenault (Quebec), Lara Gasparotto (Belgium), Marine Lécuyer (France), and Chieko Shiraishi (Japan). These artists drew inspiration from the Gaspé region to create photographic works worthy of their personal and poetic worlds. Their work is curated by Claude Goulet, founder and artistic director of Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie.

The public is invited to come and discover four distinct artistic approaches:

Maude Arsenault explores the shores, beaches, cliffs, and seascapes of the Gaspé coast, capturing the transformations of this territory in images and video. Lara Gasparotto offers images that combine gentleness and wildness, transporting the viewer to an imaginary realm imbued with a desire to escape. Marine Lécuyer departs from reality to offer a sensitive and subjective experience of the Gaspé Peninsula through the prism of fiction. Chieko Shiraishi, a virtuoso of silver printing, elevates her photographs through this technique. Her universe, both poetic and introspective, invites deep contemplation.

The exhibition opening will take place on Sunday, November 3, from 2 to 4 p.m., at the MAQ.

Chieko Shiraishi is a Japanese photographer born in 1968 in Yokosuka, Japan. A true virtuoso of silver printing (she studied photography and darkroom development with Katsuhito Nakazato and Kazuo Kitai, among others), she uses this technique to enhance her images. Her unique world is poetic and deeply introspective. Her photography book Shikawatari received the prestigious Higashikawa Prize Special Photographer Award in May 2021.

Artistic approach:
Chieko's images are silver-based photographs created using a retouching technique called zokin-gake (rag wiping), which was very popular among photographers in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. This technique, which originated abroad, was used as a means of retouching photographs. Amateurs of the time experimented with it as a new form of artistic expression. This technique truly evolved in a way that was unique to Japan.

These photographs, in which human presence is silent, reveal the photographer's wanderings and her encounter with this realm where the living and mystical spirits meet. Standing before Shiraishi's images, we find ourselves guided by deer, transported to the gates of an enchanting and sacred world.

Reference:

https://www.photogaspesie.ca/portfolio/chieko-shiraishi-a-carleton-sur-mer/

https://actuphoto.com/36937-5-questions-a-chieko-shiraishi.html#:~:text=La%20photographe%20japonaise%20n’en%20est%20pas%20%C3%A0%20ses%20d%C3%A9buts.%20Elle

Website: https://www.instagram.com/chieko.shiraishi/

Lara Gasparotto (Liège, 1989) is a graduate of the École Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc (Liège). She lives and works in Anthisnes, Wallonia (Belgium). Her work has been exhibited on numerous occasions in Belgium and abroad, notably at the Liège Photography Biennial, the Bonnefantenmuseum (Maastricht), the Guandong Museum of Arts (Guangzhou), the 3 Shadows Arts Center (Beijing), the OCT Arts Center (Shenzhen), the FotoMuseum Den Haag, the Botanique (Brussels), and the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris.

She has five books to her credit and occasionally works as a curator. Since 2019, she has also been working on the African Vox project, set up with museologist Basika Paola. The African Vox project was launched with the aim of stimulating contemporary Belgian art by inviting young Belgian and Congolese artists to reclaim their colonial history. The complex history linking these two countries remains, even today, a taboo subject on both sides of the hemisphere.

Artistic approach:
A photographic series capturing the essence of nature in the Gaspé Peninsula. Its trees, torrents and rivers, flocks of birds, rocks. These images, imbued with a character that is both wild and gentle, transport viewers into a dreamlike world, evoking a desire to escape to this mysterious region.

Each image, revealing the intricate beauty of nature's elements, from rugged rocks to delicate mushrooms, paints a vivid picture of this serene yet wild landscape, inviting viewers to explore and immerse themselves in this captivating world.

It is above all the gaze of a mother observing the world from her child's perspective.

Reference: https://www.photogaspesie.ca/portfolio/lara-gasparotto-a-matapedia/

Website: https://laragasparotto.com/about/

Born in 1986, Marine Lécuyer lives and works in Nouvelle-Aquitaine (France). A self-taught photographer, she has developed a personal style at the crossroads of reality and imagination, focused primarily on exploring the notion of territory, whether geographical or intimate. Her stories question the sensory worlds that surround us and revolve around the themes of traces, disappearance, and memory, with a particular focus on how we inhabit the world and our relationship with living things. Solo and group exhibitions have enabled her to show her work at various festivals and cultural venues in France and abroad. Her photographs are represented by the Arrêt sur l'image gallery in Bordeaux.

Artistic approach:
"Cliffs, forests, rivers. Signs, apparitions, presences. Rain and fog. During this residency in Gaspésie, I distance myself from reality and move into a world where the sky covers the earth. I walk in a cloud and turn my gaze to the beauty and power of the natural spaces I pass through, struck by the fragility of the human presence that inhabits them. Here, there, elsewhere: there are our attempts to be in the world, our failures and our hopes. The river turns into the sea, and in the trees the light turns to gold. On the beach, I touch with my fingertips the millions of years that break away from the cliff and slide towards the horizon. This is one of the edges of the world, and it is said that the earth, the rock, the stars, and the sea are eternal here.

A sensitive and subjective experience of the Gaspé Peninsula, Préludes takes a fictional approach to explore the contours of an elegiac and vibrant natural world, juxtaposed with the ephemeral presence of humans in a world where temporalities intermingle.

Reference: https://www.photogaspesie.ca/portfolio/marine-lecuyer-a-perce/

Website: https://marinelecuyer.com/a-propos-bio/

Initially working behind the lens in the fashion industry, Maude Arsenault (b. 1973, Montreal), photographer, artist, mother, and feminist, shifted her focus to the visual arts about ten years ago. Her work explores themes of female representation, private space, domesticity, and intimacy through a photographic and material approach that oscillates between abstract compositions, self-portraits, landscapes, and documentary images. She explores photographic and printed images, collage, sculpture, and installation. In doing so, her projects deploy unexpected body-spaces and spaces of the body, with a view to self-determination for women.

Maude Arsenault lives between Montreal and New York City and has presented exhibitions and public presentations in Canada, the United States, France, and Japan. In recent years, she has completed various research-creation residencies in the United States, France, Japan, and Canada. In 2020, she published Entangled, her first photography book, with Los Angeles-based publisher Deadbeat Club Press, and in November 2023, she released a second book, Resurfacing, with the same publisher at the PARIS PHOTO fair. Her book Entangled was a finalist for Photographic Book of the Year at the Singapore Photography Festival (2020) and FELIFA in Buenos Aires (2021) and has just been reissued for a second time.

Maude Arsenault holds a certificate in art history from the University of Montreal and a master's degree in visual and media arts from the University of Quebec in Montreal. She is the recipient of the 2023 Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Award in Contemporary Art, the 2021 Yvonne L. Bombardier Award in Visual Arts, the 2020 UQAM Women's Center Award, and several grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. Maude won the prestigious Hariban Award International Photography Grand Prix in Japan in 2020, where she was selected by Lucy Gallun, curator of photography at MoMA in New York, Emma Bowkett, art critic at FT Magazine in the United Kingdom, Felix Hoffman, director of the C/O Berlin Museum of Photography, and Ma Quan, professor emeritus in China. In 2024, Maude is currently on the prestigious shortlist for the Leica Oskar Barnack International Award.

Maude Arsenault's works are part of various private and public collections, including those of MoMA (NY), Pier24 San Francisco, NY City Public Library, Benrido Atelier (Japan), and many others.

Artistic approach:
This exhibition is the result of a research residency in the Gaspé Peninsula in the summer of 2022 and fall of 2023. I wanted this project to be a continuation of the work Étoffe de soi : plis et replis (Fabric of Self: Folds and Creases), which I presented in Percé in 2021. My intention was to reflect once again on the spaces of female bodies and the notions of place and nature in transformation. Thus, based on photographic observations of the Gaspé landscape and coastline undergoing erosion due to climate change, I wanted to think, in parallel, about the mutations of female bodies, their erosion, their representations, their oppression, their burdens, their protection, and their impermanence.

During these stays in Gaspésie, I documented the changing shores, beaches, cliffs, and seascapes of the coast through photography and video, investing them with my female body through performative acts, self-portraits, and in situ sculptural pieces. My material research and photographic and video essays have attempted to take an introspective look at the micro and macro landscape in relation to the body-spaces-territories to which we relate in the formation of our individual and collective identities. More specifically, I address our alterations, our journeys, and our purposes in the context of a climate and social crisis that is disrupting our ecological, bodily, economic, and identity balances.

In this majestic territory undergoing upheaval, I immersed myself in the surroundings in order to create the photographic and sculptural exhibition Navigating an Ocean of Flesh.

Maude Arsenault's work explores themes of female representation, private spaces, domesticity, and intimacy through a photographic and material approach that oscillates between abstract compositions, self-portraits, landscapes, and documentary images. Maude explores collage, sculpture, and installation using photographic and printed images. In doing so, her projects reveal unexpected bodily spaces and bodily spaces, with a view to self-determination for women.