Raphaëlle Groulx-Julien, 2023
Raphaëlle Groulx-Julien is the winner of the François-Xavier Marange 2022 grant.
Raphaëlle Groulx-Julien’s work has been shown in group exhibitions and art fairs in Montreal (Artch, Galerie de l’UQÀM, CDEx, Galerie Gham & Dafe) and New York (Atlantic Gallery, Jill Krutick Fine Art). His images have been published in Canadian Art and Item magazines, and in Le Devoir newspaper. In addition to the François-Xavier-Marange grant, her experiments earned her the Jean Pitre and Claude Leclerc awards at the end of her bachelor’s degree, and enabled her to obtain the CGS M grant for her master’s studies. With a bachelor’s degree (2020), she is currently completing her master’s in visual and media arts at UQÀM.
Her aim is to render tangible the sense of wonder aroused by the irruption, in the banal and everyday, of visions provoked by lighting effects or atmospheres that seem to blur the boundary between the real and the unreal. Her practice follows a multidisciplinary approach based on traditional techniques. Through the materials and processes she employs, and the attention she pays to fabrication, she attempts to convey the preciousness of feeling.
“My master’s project dealt with the myth of Narcissus and Echo, and focused on the feeling of love inspired by a vision. During the course of the project, I became interested in the way this love is consummated, namely by the dissolution of the body leading to its metamorphosis. During my residency, I want to push the idea of dissolution. It implies something initially whole, but also fragile and vulnerable. It constitutes a state of transition that offers decompartmentalization and limpidity, and the possibility of mixing substances and constituting a new form, in a process of simultaneous destruction and construction. By exploring the printed arts, I want to address dissolution in the process of representation, i.e. undoing and mixing images while producing them. But I’m also going to work in parallel with these issues in other media, particularly ceramics, and try to dissolve these practices themselves in order to bring them together. I’m looking to see how these processes can modulate the relationship between opposites, such as the sculptural object and the image, or the lightness of paper and the weight of ceramics.”
M et Mme Malo, Atelier Circulaire’s friends, Raphaëlle Groulx-Julien and Paule Mainguy, 2023