Galerie d'art Stewart Hall

Studio 101, the first exhibition of this edition, is presented at the Stewart Hall Art Gallery in Pointe-Claire. Located on the third floor of the former residence of the Scottish Clan MacLean, designed by the Scottish architect Robert Finlay, the gallery is a perfect space for highlighting different ways of perceiving colours, various viewing and visual distortion apparatuses, and the natural and artificial elements that influence our gaze. The mansard roof, the windows facing Lake Saint-Louis, the brick walls, and the wood beams are interesting characteristics for the exhibiting artists whose paintings interconnect the natural, scientific, and political worlds. To make her paintings and introduce visual distortions, Karine Fréchette uses optical tools such as lenses, convex mirrors, and reflective Mylar. In her Vanités series, she considers the representation of the living world, in this case flowers, through a constant stream of images and sounds drawn from Web 2.0. Her interest in the light emanating from digital screens gives her painting an electric charge and palette. During a studio visit, Fréchette told me that she prefers working in the evenings and at night under neon lights, which help her to perceive colours more accurately unlike the ever-changing natural daylight. The use of tools to enhance perception also finds resonance in Maude Deslauriers’s work. During our last studio visit, she told me about the Hockney-Falco thesis (1999 and 2000), which argues that advances in naturalism and accuracy of representation in botanical drawings were due to optical technologies such as camera obscura, camera lucida, and convex mirrors. Deslauriers is also interested in the way in which pollinators perceive the colours of flowers. Her work explores the intersection between the body, consciousness, and the natural world. What’s more, she has had to move studios several times since we started considering her participation in Pictura: from Rue Chabanel to Avenue Casgrain then to the Villeray neighbourhood, the idea of the studio as a personal creative space has been disrupted more than once. For the artists in this exhibition, the studio is a research lab, a space where they can develop an art practice combined with scientific research. Carl-Philippe Simonise has been a studio nomad ever