Genevieve Dagenais is an artist, sculptor, and photographer originally from the Laurentides, currently living and working in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke). She holds a bachelor’s degree in visual and media arts from Université du Québec à Montréal, where she received the Thomas Corriveau and Mario Côté prize for excellence in the field, as well as a scholarship from the Faculty of Arts. Her work has been shown in many group exhibitions, notably at Arprim, where she was awarded the Prix Albert-Dumouchel, which includes a three-month residency at L'imprimerie centre d'artistes. Her work has also been exhibited in Institut National Art contemporain, Circa, the Centre d'art Diane Dufresne, Espace sensible in Gatineau, in UQAM’s gallery, at Place des Arts, at ARTCH, and Livart.
Genevieve will be at Atelier Silex in the fall of 2023, as one of the members of Circa selected for its artist residency.
My practice rests on techniques of shaping, casting, and manipulating analogue images as a way of getting at imprints, traces, and disappearances. In search of a poetic balance born of the encounter between the subject and the materiality of the creative process, I give substance to the various formal manifestations of what was and what remains. By prioritizing working with ceramic, wax, textiles and the analog, I engage in a reconsideration of the technical know-how of various fields—this lends a nostalgic ethos to my work. The use of these materials allows me to investigate their material potentialities and constraints, as a way of evoking the fragility of all that is living.
By approaching art as a contemplative space, I broach creation in the manner of mourning—within a space that floats in between the real and the chimerical. My offerings, stripped of all artifice, emerge in a sober yet gossamer plastic vocabulary. My work offers an encounter between the image and the object in an ethereal and delicate articulation that takes place within the tranquility of the artifact’s own poetics.
Sculpture and photography allow me to orbit the vast themes of evanescence and corporeality by transcribing transitory and mutable fragments of the traces that time leaves on existence. The carnal, memory, the perceptible, and the unintelligible intersect in my work in order to give substance to the sensory points at which form and matter are linked. I explore the sensory potential that remains within the object and the image—or again, I chart the affective weight that I lend to these.