Fondation

Pénélope et Chloë are a duo of women artists based in Montréal, working together since 2014. They each obtained a B.A. in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2015. Their practice is developed through knowing collaborations, engaging with public spaces through the use of various games and textile installations. The duo's mission is to reuse their works in a colourful cycle in order to make them grow and see them transform. Leaving space for experimentation and spontaneous encounters and actions, they pay particular attention to the environmental impact of their work. They co-founded Récré, a zero-waste play laboratory for children and adults. They believe that two heads are better than one to survive the somewhat hostile terrain of the creative world.

Their work has been seen in collective exhibitions across Canada, including at Diagonale (Montréal, 2021), Centre d’exposition Lethbridge (Montréal, 2020), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2018), and internationally in Argentina (La Ira Del Dios and ArteBA Fair, Buenos Aires, 2018), France (Paris, 2015) and Switzerland (Renens, 2015). Pénélope and Chloë are also tied to dance. They worked on the set design of many projects, including 1, 2 maybe 3 by Jean & Syd (Centaur Theatre, 2022), More-than-things by Emilie Pinault (La Chapelle, 2020), Le Fil des jours (2021) and Danses à venir (2022) in collaboration with researcher and choreographer Catherine Lavoie-Marcus.

Mariane Stratis (Québec, 1990) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Rivière-du-Loup. Her work focuses on how societies manage, process and adapt to the loss of human life. In her practice, she questions the various cults related to death as an event by raising questions about the future of the body and its fragility. She produces installations that include sculpture, photography, archives, textiles and performance. She is currently a M.F.A candidate in Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University (2019-2023) and holds a B.A. in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2016).

She has recently taken part in residencies in France (Ateliers Millesfeuilles, Nantes, 2016) and Canada (EST-NORD-EST, Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, 2021; Sagamie, Alma, 2021). Her work was presented in the solo exhibition Histoire d’archives molles at the Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent (Rivière-du-Loup, 2021) and in group shows, including: Géographies tactiles (Montréal, 2022), De l’esprit des lieux (Québec, 2021), Pictura: pleins feux sur la peinture (Montréal, 2020), IGNITION 16 (Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montréal, 2020) and exhibitions at Artch (Montréal, 2019) and Art Mûr (Montréal, 2015).

Marion Paquette (Montréal, 1992) lives in Montréal and holds a B.A. in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2015). Paquette’s practice stems from the creation of interfaces and situations that investigate sensitive relationships between body, space and object. Experiences of discomfort, fragility and ambiguity instigate the artist’s research on the taming of the social, natural, and built environment. This approach, intimately linked to the contexts in which Paquette’s interventions take place, generates performative activations and installations that combine textiles, objects, photography, and video. The artist also takes part in the collaborative duo demi-mesure (2020) alongside Clara Cousineau. This collaboration explores the potential of the "in-between condition," oscillating between opposition and complementarity.

Since 2016, Paquette has taken part in multiple residencies in Canada, France and Japan. The artist’s work has been presented in the context of group exhibitions in France at the Fol Film Festival (Paris, 2021) and at Ateliers Millesfeuilles (Nantes, 2016); in Japan, at Studio Kura (Itoshima, 2018) and in Canada, notably at Dazibao (Montréal 2022), Espace sensible (Montréal, 2022), OFFTA (Montréal, 2021), Galerie Castiglione (Montréal, 2020), Espace Transmission (Montréal, 2020), Galerie Atelier B (Montréal, 2020), Artch (Montréal, 2019) and GHAM & DAFE (Montréal, 2018).