Michelle LaSalle

Michelle LaSalle lives and works in Tio’tia:ke – Mooniyang – Montreal. While her practice is multidisciplinary, she is primarily interested in printmaking and its deployment within a space. She holds an MFA in Print Media from Concordia University (2022) and a BFA in Visual and Media Arts from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM). Winner of the 2021 Denis-Charland scholarship and the 2014 Albert-Dumouchel prize, she participated in and exhibited her work at several national and provincial artist residencies. Notable exhibitions include a duo show at Arprim in Montreal and solo exhibitions at SNAP in Edmonton as well as Presse-Papier and Trois-Rivières. In 2023, she was selected for Trois-Rivières’ 13th International Contemporary Print Biennial, where she received the UQTR Emerging Artist of Quebec prize.

Statement:

Michelle LaSalle’s practice as an artist intersects with her life as a mother and as a human being; they feed and pollinate each other. Her work stands on the border between the familiar, intimate space of the home and the print studio, with its repetitive, meditative, and embodied gestures. From this it, she draws the metaphors that give birth to her work. The use of multiple installation devices invites the public to discover, look closer, touch, open, read, and move objects. She investigates bottom-drawer archives – ordinary and banal – as a tool to evoke time, with its strange and spectacular softness. Time leaves a trace, fixed in a photographic moment, which then stretches into the repetitive gestures of studio work and materializes in her pieces: installations, books, objects, or casual performances. She is interested in the potential slowness of time, which, like her work, is rhythmic, repetitive, and accumulated. It is a time that can be seen and felt, its presence becoming physical as if we could touch it. The paper is creased like a wrinkle, a mark that can be seen and touched, created through attrition – little by little.