Salon Révélations 2023

Québec, nation à l’honneur

June 7-11, 2023
Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris

Révélations, an international event bringing together practices from all craft disciplines, offers a space for artistic expression in the field of fine crafts. It celebrates excellence, but also avant-gardism and emerging talent. Ateliers d’art de France chose to highlight Quebec as the nation of honour for the 2023 edition, and the Conseil des métiers d’art du Québec and the Maison des métiers d’art de Québec joined their forces in order to present works by over 30 artists from the province of Quebec.

I had the chance to act as the lead curator for the Quebec delegation, which led me to select a total of 28 artists - 22 of them whose work was presented in four corner stands at the centre of the fair, and 6 artists whose work was presented in the international exhibition Le Banquet.

The works selected for this exhibition reflect Quebec's unique position in the international fine crafts scene. Quebec is both steeped in European craftsmanship and methods of teaching and constantly influenced by the North American Anglophone academic environment, not to mention an evolving artistic production among indigenous peoples, for whom the distinctions between fine crafts and visual art are extremely fluid, if not non-existent.

I wanted to present fine crafts as a practice centred around notions of material, of course, but also gesture. Matter and gesture are the very foundations of creative intent, because of their nature and their link with the body, space and time. Without necessarily being functional or utilitarian, the craft object is hybrid: it straddles the spheres of visual arts and design. The notion of craftsmanship is always present, but the various interactions with materials presented in the selection may reflect a particular tradition, be entirely invented by the artist, or deconstruct and refute a pre-existing traditional approach. In addition to focusing on the notion of transformation, I propose to redirect our gaze to the importance of the artist's act, that which we cannot see but which leaves its mark on the craft object as the tangible trace of an oft-repeated performance.

Rather than articulating the selection around the various materials and techniques employed by the artists, I wanted to explore a variety of formal and conceptual approaches - including formal exploration, material and gestural study, the evocation of time and territory, the narration and expression of everyday life, and a theoretical approach to the nature of objects.

Artists: Eruoma Awashish, Loic Bard, Cyndie Belhumeur, Alissa Bilodeau, Charlotte Caron, Hannah Claus, Laurent Craste, Josée Desjardins, Susan Edgerley, Pascale Girardin, Aurélie Guillaume, Marie-José Gustave, Hélène et son mari, Ito Laila Lefrançois, Mylène Michaud, Mélina Schoenborn, Catherine Sheedy, Verre d’Onge, Sarah Stevenson, Ingrid Syage Tremblay, Anne-Sophie Vallée, Nico Williams, Mérida Anderson, Montserrat Duran Muntadas, Catherine Granche, Julie Bénédicte Lambert, Maude Lauzière-Dumas, Paula Murray

Photos by Michael Patten

Photo by Michael Patten

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