Review of the 37th Annual General Meeting
Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt, Allégories quelconques #1, 2020.
Photo: Jean-Philippe Pernot.
LOOKBACK TO THE AGM
In 2021, AXENÉO7 held its 37th Annual General Meeting (AGM). This year, we mobilized a record number of members, with 50 participants for a total of 100 registered members.
Highlights
Launch of the Program Autorésidences at the beginning of the pandemic;
Participation and collaboration to Radio Hull, an initiative of Centre de production DAÏMÔN;
Multiple closures and reopenings during the fiscal year, during which AXENÉO7 continued their activities, mainly with residencies and video presentations of exhibitions;
Reprogramming of the Programme estival d’art public to the summer of 2021, originally planned for 2020, in collaboration with the Sentier culturel and the City of Gatineau;
Redesign of the website and visual identity of AXENÉO7;
Opening of the carpentry woodshop (accessible to members).
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
At the 37th Annual General Meeting, four positions were up for election: President, Vice President, and two Administrator positions.
Congratulations to Catherine Lescarbeau, elected President for a second consecutive term; and to Lieven Meyer, Olivia Thiland and Anne-Marie Trépanier, for joining AXENÉO7's Board of Directors as Administrators.
Josée Dubeau remains on the Board of Directors, but has been elected Vice President.
Edith Brunette remains as Administrator and Pavel Pavlov as Treasurer.
Catherine Lescarbeau
Catherine Lescarbeau is currently pursuing a doctorate in research creation at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in Quebec and France (Galerie UQO, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, La Mirage, Fonderie Darling, FRAC Lorraine). She teaches visual arts at the college level and she serves on the AXENÉO7 Board of Directors in Gatineau.
She is a multidisciplinary artist who is interested in the relationship between conceptual art and institutional critique and the relevance of these approaches today. Her most recent research focuses on the houseplant. By focusing her research on this object, the artist seeks to develop an interface allowing her to reflect on the relationship between culture and nature within corporate and institutional spaces.
Josée Dubeau
Josée Dubeau lives and works between Gatineau and Quebec City. The artist develops her practice in the context of residencies and exhibitions both in Quebec and abroad. International residencies include the Studio du Québec in Berlin at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Germany, 2004-2005), the Studio du Québec in Tokyo (Japan, 2009), the Finnish Artists Studio Foundation residency (Finland, 2018) and the Canada Council for the Arts London Studio at SPACE (England, 2011). She has taught drawing and sculpture at the University of Ottawa and the Université du Québec en Outaouais (2000-2010). For the past twenty years, she has been working on projects integrating art and architecture. Her work can be found in public collections in Switzerland, Germany and Canada (Ottawa Art Gallery, Ville de Montréal, Collection Prêt d'œuvres d'art (CPOA) art bank of the Musée national des Beaux-Arts du Québec). Dubeau is also a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
Pavel Pavlov
Pavel Pavlov is an artist and professor at École multidisciplinaire de l'image (EMI) à l'Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO). His research — presented in installation form — explores socio-political situations filmed according to protocols extrapolated from the architectural and urban specificities of the studied contexts. His current project titled Le patio continues his socio-political reflection through an exploration of the ethical issues linked to exchange and collaborative work in the artistic milieu on the periphery of the centre.
Edith Brunette
Edith Brunette is an artist, writer and researcher. Her artistic research has been presented in several places in Canada, France and Japan. In addition to her art practice, Edith also regularly publishes articles in various art magazines and university journals. She is actively involved in the arts milieu and is the co-founder of Journée sans culture, a discussion platform for art workers. She is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Ottawa with a focus on various conceptions of the freedom of Canadian artists and how these influence their political engagement.
Lieven Meyer
Originally from Germany, Lieven Meyer currently lives and works in Quebec. While growing up in East Berlin in the 1980s, his first artistic influences were sculpture, painting and academic drawing, followed by a period as a self-taught artist. After training in contemporary sculpture at the University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel (Muthesius Kunsthochschule, Germany, 2009-2013), he completed an MFA at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM, 2016). His research is inspired by a socio-political, philosophical and historical reading of sculpture, focusing on forms of economic and imperial power within current Western societies. This process also seeks to explore representational contexts through the design of environments, places or events. Meyer teaches in the visual arts program of the École multidisciplinaire de l'image (EMI) at the Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO) in Gatineau. He has been a member of the AXENÉO7 Board of Directors since fall 2021.
Olivia Thiland
Olivia Thiland is an emerging artist who lives and works in Gatineau. She holds a BFA from Université du Québec en Outaouais and is a member of the artist association Entre-Deux since 2019. By way of a multidisciplinary arts practice, she focuses on the question of the non-human animal as a commodity or an aesthetized being. In studying the modern relations between human and non-human animals, she reveals the aesthetization and deformation processes that the non-human animal is subjected to for food, commercial and recreational ends. Using the aesthetic foundations of art as a point of departure, she imitates industrial seduction principles and addresses current ethical issues.
Anne-Marie Trépanier
Through an undisciplined practice that mixes archival (re)mediation, writing, publishing, conversation and digital media, they focus on transmission as a vector of social, affective and historical transformation. Their artistic work has, among others, been presented as part of group exhibitions at AXENÉO7 (Gatineau), Gold Saucer Studio (Vancouver), Centrale, Eastern Bloc as well as Espace Projet. Their texts have been published in various cultural and artistic magazines and publications such as esse, Spirale, Termes (Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery), OEI Magazine, Public Parking, Sabir, and Architecture | Concordia. Since 2018, they have been co-editor, alongside Laure Bourgault, of Cigale magazine, a bilingual publication of writing by contemporary artists They are currently a master’s student in Communication Studies at Concordia University, where they previously received a BA in Intermedia/Cyberarts.
TRIBUTE TO JEAN-YVES VIGNEAU
The entire AXENÉO7 team would like to warmly thank Jean-Yves Vigneau, originally from the Magdalen Islands and later Gatineau, for his tireless contribution to the evolution of AXENÉO7. With more than thirty years of involvement with AXENÉO7 as an artist and active member, Jean-Yves Vigneau has not only contributed to the advancement of contemporary art practice in Quebec, which is now part of the national art history, but he has never ceased to believe in the community of artists in order to carry out unifying projects; let us note his dedication to the rehabilitation of the La Filature building, a long-term project. He was a pillar of the project for more than ten years, along with Marie-Jeanne Musiol and Normand Rivest, when AXENÉO7 and the DAÏMÔN production centre were still located at 205 Montcalm Street. Together, they saved a factory condemned to demolition, the Hanson Hosiery Mills, and with the support of the City of Gatineau and the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications (MCC) turned it into a rich building for research and dissemination of contemporary art which is now part of the Outaouais' industrial heritage. Having served in turn as president, treasurer and vice-president, we wish to acknowledge, through the forthcoming publication of an unpublished work, his volunteer commitment and the heavy responsibilities he assumed over the years at AXENÉO7, DAÏMÔN and La Filature inc., where he still serves as president.
Although he leaves an irreplaceable void in the AXENÉO7 community, we will be eternally grateful for the years spent learning alongside him. We will continue his unwavering activism in the cultural milieu of the Outaouais by following the living influence of the transmission of his knowledge that he so generously bequeathed to us.
Biography
A member of AXENÉO7 since its foundation in 1983, Jean-Yves Vigneau has served on the Board of Directors at various times for a total of twenty years. He also held the positions of technician and artistic director in the 1990s, and then curated or co-curated projects such as Les Gondoles d'artistes in 2000 and À perte de vue in 2017. Jean-Yves has been on the Board of Directors of the Regroupement des centres d'artistes autogérés du Québec (RCAAQ) for ten years, including three as president. He was one of the main instigators of the La Filature inc. project, among other things, by coordinating its implementation. Over the years, he has presented some forty solo exhibitions, including four at AXENÉO7. He has also carried out projects as artist in residence or in the context of symposia and other events throughout Quebec and in several other regions of Canada, as well as in Wales, Finland, Poland, Brazil, Switzerland, France and the United States. He has also created some thirty permanent public works. After a dozen consecutive years on the AXENÉO7 Board of Directors, he has chosen to step down in 2021 to devote himself to his artistic practice and to the development of La Filature inc., of which he is the president.