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WORK: L'autre côté la Voie lactée, École Mer-et-Monde, Mirabel, Qc
ARTIST: Bolduc Catherine
WEB SITE : http://www.catherinebolduc.com

BIOGRAPHY

Catherine Bolduc is a visual artist born in Quebec (Canada) in 1970. She lives and works in Montreal. She had several solo and group exhibitions in Quebec and abroad (Germany, Spain, France, Netherlands, United States). She stayed in various artist residencies abroad, including the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, the Studio du Québec à Tokyo and, in the frame of Pépinières européennes pour jeunes artistes, the National Sculpture Factory in Cork, Ireland. She has received awards, including the Bourse Duchamp-Villon 2001, Best Publication at the Gala des arts visuels 2012 and the Powerhouse Prize 2013. Her second permanent public sculpture will be inaugurated in September 2014 in the Parc Lahaie in the Mile End in Montreal. Catherine Bolduc is represented by Thomas Henry Ross Gallery.

ARTIST STATEMENT

In the practice of my art (installation, sculpture and drawing), I am interested in the way the human psyche perceives and constructs reality by feeding it with its own desires, by transgressing it with its fabrication of fantasy and fiction. The core of my work rests on subjective experiences dealing with personal memories in which fabulation and idealization produce a mental transfiguration of reality or conversely revisited desire is subjected to the ordeal of reality, illusion faces disillusion and deception head-on. My work is an invitation to experience phantasmagorical spaces alluding to, for instance, an ideal fantasized life, exotic quests, utopian dreams of love, oneiric wanderings, but where magic also reveals its dark side. My aesthetic intention is twofold: it oscillates between the evocation of the human vulnerability in front of the discrepancy of the reality with the desires and the reconciliation by a celebration of the poetic power of the banal.

In my installations, deliberately enticing effects made of smoke, sounds, mirrors, coloured lights, strobes and other delights for the eye magnify various junk and everyday materials. However the precariousness of the assemblage of a house of cards, the melting nature of chocolate, the threatening, even unbearable lightening for instance, risk reducing the wonders to nothingness. I often try to challenge the viewer’s imagination towards the other side of a closed or slightly closed door, to go behind an impassable wall or a hole riddled one, to peek in a showcase, in improbable portholes, in door’s peepholes or inside a mysterious wardrobe for instance, like a breach in reality thus opening up to a fantastic realm. In my public art projects, I make bronze copies of the same various junk and everyday materials and I change their scale to magnify them, in a way which invites the passer-by to daydream.

While pursuing my installation research, I maintain a sustained drawing practice. Drawing allows me to create spaces in which gravity has no hold, where the eye is able to be dazed without physical restraint in an overload of labyrinthine lines. My drawings are composed of motifs amalgamating one to the other thus creating artificial landscapes. Most of these landscapes and unusual geographies refer to real places, for instance places where I have traveled (Egypt, Turkey, China, Japan), or exotic and disappeared islands, but my drawings turn them into fantasized versions of their actual scenery. These real places having become unreal spaces are besotted with an idealized vision of the world where desire and fabulation overcome reality and plausibility. But, simultaneously these entanglements of black hair and erupting volcanoes also flirt with disaster and the dark side of the psyche, evoking human vulnerability when facing the discrepancy between desires and reality.

Catherine Bolduc

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