Thérèse Joyce-Gagnon Survol 1979-2009
Curator: Hedwidge Asselin
Vernissage: Thursday May 28 at 6 pm
Exhibition: May 29 to June 20, 2009
Artist’s Talk with Thérèse Joyce-Gagnon and Hedwidge Asselin: Thursday, June 11 at 7 pm
The McClure gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Survol 1979-2009, a mini-retrospective featuring the work of artist painter Thérèse Joyce-Gagnon, well known in Quebec’s artistic milieu. The exhibition is an overview of this artist’s 30 years of work, covering the period from 1979 to 2009.
Joyce-Gagnon’s artistic work is essentially based on series. When in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in the 80s, she discovered the generation X and kept on developing this theme for more than a decade. She found this generation to be aware of ecology and political choices. Their questioning aroused her interest and led her to her present research on ecology. She began this new series with the intention to bring in full light the carelessness, loss of decency and blindness of leaders.
In large format works, she sometimes shows the bareness of the earth where clouds of dust enhance the dryness of the earth. These barren places become spaces for meditation where the bystander freed of guilt is forced to note the evolution of nature.
She still pursues this interest, which now brings her to show the urgency to protect the environment. She fell in love with those “protected areas” (aires protégées), such as lakes, ponds, rivers, marshes, plantations, forests, etc. She denounces the slowness of government action in this regard. The size of her new canvases becomes smaller, more intimate.
Her early 80s series was focused on the theme of intimacy. “Lieux cachés, lieux sacrés” (Hidden Places, Sacred Places) shows the intimacy of a studio. At the beginning of her career, a very long series of abstract paintings titled “Empreintes” (Prints) brought her pure joy and laid the foundations for all her subsequent work. This subsequent work has included paintings inspired by the ecological disaster at Sao Paulo, self portraits painted in solitude, the teenagers’ series and intimate family scenes. Her paintings have always been influenced by her immediate environment.
And throughout her career and through all of the abovementioned series, light remained undoubtedly the main focus of her research.
Thérèse Joyce-Gagnon was born in Montreal where she received her artistic education at l’École des Beaux-Arts and at l’UQAM. Her works have been presented in Canada and in France. Cofounder and President of the Regroupement des artistes en arts visuels du Québec (RAAV) 94-95 and president of the Conseil de la peinture du Québec 91-92, she is very involved in the artistic community. She was received as a member from the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts in 2002 and received bursaries a number of times from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec and from the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work is included in public and private collections.