The MNBAQ is celebrating the new generation of photographers and contributing to raising its profile
QUÉBEC CITY, Nov. 23, 2021 /CNW Telbec/ - The Estate of Lynne Cohen, in collaboration with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) and its Foundation, is proud to announce that the Prix Lynne-Cohen has been awarded to Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin.
The biennial award seeks to support the practice of up-and-coming professional Québec visual artists whose practice centres on photography. The 2021 recipient will receive a $10 000 cash prize and her work will be highlighted through a video portrait produced by the MNBAQ, for dissemination on all its platforms.
"I perceive Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin as a genuine creator of images. Her visually arresting photographs composed on multiple levels are pleasantly stimulating and are worthy of repeated examination. Her distinctive approach enables her to find subjects and highlight what they are hiding," enthusiastically noted Andrew Lugg of the Estate of Lynne Cohen.
"Although she is not a documentary photographer, she relies on what Walker Evans has called the documentary style. Even the photographs in her most recent series, Silver Has No Shine For Magpies, which explores the universe of the Québec Mafia and the myths surrounding it, transcends the theme and are self-contained. I also admire her use of colour, which she masters exceptionally well and differently from most photographers. While her photographs are quite different from those of Lynne Cohen, I believe that she is following a similar path. She would have been impressed with Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin's talent and her contribution to contemporary art. Other excellent works are anticipated, which the Prix Lynne-Cohen seeks to encourage," Mr. Lugg added.
Members of the 2021 Prix Lynne-Cohen jury
Candidates were examined based on proposals submitted by a jury assembled by Eve-Lyne Beaudry, Curator of Contemporary Art (1900-2000) at the MNBAQ, comprising Emeren Garcia, art historian and formerly head of travelling exhibitions at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Nuria Carton de Grammont, PhD, Director and Curator of the SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, Maxime Coulombe, sociologist, art historian, and full professor in the history and theories of present-day art at Université Laval, and Charles Guilbert, artist, art critic, and professor at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal.
Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin's talent impressed the jury members. "It is challenging to say why Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin's photographic work is praiseworthy precisely because her images reveal something that alludes to sensation, mystery, and the unspoken. As jury member Charles Guilbert noted, "Is not transcending language what an artist aspires to?".
Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction
Through her narrative approach in photography, Laurence Hervieux–Gosselin urges us to reflect on the influence of storytelling on our perception of the world. Through her series of photographs, she forges links between disparate stories, examines modern myths, popular narratives, or her own background, which she reshapes into complex stories that open onto the imaginative universe. She seeks to question our narrative instincts, such as our propensity to unconsciously borrow narrative conventions from familiar stories to give a certain meaning to life, to invite new interpretations of the real.
A mysterious atmosphere emanates from the landscapes, interiors, and portraits of Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin, who composes her series of images mainly photographed on 120 film. Some of her works stem from investigations or discoveries in the field while others are staged. Lastly, the boundary between the two is deliberately blurred to reveal a parallel world that is at once strange and familiar.
Among the remarkable series that the artist has created, mention should be made of Cité de Marie, which superimposes notions such as religion, capitalism, and the need for security, thereby revealing a photograph's full narrative power and its ability to create suspense. In La vie intense, the artist emphasizes light sources, often electric, simultaneously exploring questions similar to those that philosopher Tristan Garcia, for whom intensity as an imperative is the trap facing contemporary humankind. Light as the origin of fiction is also central to the series Double feature, in which images from a vividly coloured cinema and quasi psychedelic images of mushrooms photographed at night in coloured lighting alternate. Lastly, Silver Has No Shine For Magpies also pursues reflection on the power of cinema, especially on the mythicization by Hollywood of the Mafia, where humour draws us in a twisted way to this violence that colonizes our imaginative universes.
Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin in a nutshell
Montréal-based artist and photographer Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin was born in 1991. She studied scriptwriting and communications at the Université du Québec à Montréal and holds a bachelor's degree in photography from Concordia University and a master's degree in Art Photography from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, New York. In 2018, during her master's program, she undertook a residency in Berlin at the Fahrbereitschaft of the Haubrok Foundation.
Since 2014, she has presented four solo or two-person shows and participated in more than 20 group exhibitions. In 2014 she was a finalist for the Ideastap Photographic Award with Magnum Photos, and in 2018 she was a finalist for the Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award. Her work has been exhibited recently at the China Millennium Monument (Beijing, 2018), at Uqbar (Berlin, 2018), at the Aviary Gallery (Boston, 2019), and at La Castiglione (Montréal, 2020).
A video portrait of Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin
The MNBAQ has produced a video brief in Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin's Montréal workshop to publicize the artist and her work. The report, disseminated on the MNBAQ's social networks in conjunction with the announcement of her award, is devoted to the third winner of the Prix Lynne-Cohen and highlights her artistic approach and presents a selection of works that illustrate her career in recent years.
To view: https://youtu.be/0VhvVJufSAI
Lynne Cohen, impressive and inspiring in equal measure
Lynne Cohen is certainly one of the most respected contemporary photographers in Canada, whose renown extends to the United States and Europe. She was born in 1944 in Racine, Wisconsin. Following a year of study at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, in 1967 she obtained a bachelor's degree in science from the University of Wisconsin, and in 1969, a master's degree in visual arts from Eastern Michigan University. She settled in Canada in 1973, where she lived until her death in 2014. She first lived and worked in Ottawa for 30 years, where she taught at the University of Ottawa and assiduously pursued her artistic practice. In 2003 she moved to Montréal.
Throughout her rich, diverse career, Lynne Cohen devoted herself to the photography of interior spaces, which she captured as they appeared to her, without intervention or staging. The singularity of her work lies in the choice of spaces usually devoid of human presence and usually out of sight. Classrooms, science laboratories, thermal establishments and military facilities are all complex, inaccessible environments that she thus makes visible to measure their strangeness.
Lynne Cohen participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions the world over. Moreover, major retrospectives offered in-depth analyses of her artistic career, including the exhibition that the National Gallery of Canada organized in 2001, which toured Canada and France; and the recent exhibition organized by the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid in 2014, presented at the Sala Vimcorsa in Córdoba and at the Sala Rekalde in Bilbao. Her work is found in nearly 50 public collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Australian Art Gallery, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Lynne Cohen received a number of distinctions during her prolific career, including the Governor General's Award, the highest distinction granted for excellence in the visual arts and the media arts, and the first Scotiabank Photography Award, which highlighted the artist's outstanding contribution both to the advancement of her discipline and to raising its profile.
About…
The MNBAQ
Located in the heart of the National Battlefields Park, one of the world's most prestigious urban parks, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec is a unique museum complex bringing together art, architecture and nature. The museum's vast collection, comprised of over 42,000 works created since the 17th century, is showcased throughout four distinct pavilions. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and prints are shown in various exhibitions in the historic art pavilion, while works from major artists Jean Paul Lemieux, Alfred Pellan, Fernand Leduc and Jean-Paul Riopelle adorn the modern art pavilion. The Pierre Lassonde pavilion, inaugurated in June 2016, highlights the collection of contemporary Quebec art from 1960 onward including Inuit art, decorative art and design. The central pavilion, with its glass pyramid, links the four pavilions together and offers a discovery area for children. mnbaq.org
The Fondation du MNBAQ
The mission of the Fondation du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec is to support and promote the MNBAQ's mandate by fostering the development of its collections, funding exhibitions, and ensuring access to educational programs. The Fondation du MNBAQ oversaw the major fundraising campaign devoted to the construction of the Pierre Lassonde Pavilion. Since 2016, it has sought to perpetuate its support for the MNBAQ through its philanthropic development activities. fmnbaq.org
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