TUKER KAPP

Tucker Kapp is the recipient of the 2023-2024 François-Xavier Marange Grant. Printmaker-artist-typographer, poet, and playwright Tucker Kapp is currently a PhD candidate at UQAM in Studies and Practices of the Arts. He is undertaking a research-creation dissertation to understand how tools (manual/corporeal, mechanical or digital) alter artists' relationships to their creative processes and works. American by birth, and a Montrealer on occasion, he normally resides in rural France where he runs a small press publishing house, Les Écrits 9.

His 12-month residency will allow him to explore a research named : Creative writing and the use of tools : the phenomenology of technological materiality in the age of digitalization.

"In the context of my residency at the Atelier Circulaire, I wish to pursue various experiments in line with my PhD work, while taking a few side steps here and there. The main focus of my dissertation lies in unpacking how the tools of writing condition the creation of textual works, even if the resulting content appears similar or identical (black words on a white background). To put it another way, if we usually conceive of a text as a pure product of mind, how can we understand that the poem—its content, the ontological status of its creator, the color of the creative phenomenon, its degree of materialization—can be materially altered by the choice of a tool? The relationship of a human being with a given tool would seem to not only allow but promote certain practices. Beyond the ideas of nostalgia, romanticism, or anti-capitalist and anti-industrial activism, perhaps I seek in the midst of technical objects a form of subjectivity that might allow me to create better, more consistently and less distractedly, with more integrity. In the infatuation that exists around obsolete technical objects (vinyl records, typographic characters/clichés, overhead projectors) one is entitled to wonder if it is the object itself we seek, or even fetishize, or rather the result, be it in the creative processes themselves or in the works they bring into existence" In the aforementioned "side steps", I wish to explore how printed images might express, perhaps better than words, the materiality of analogical creations, printed off mechanical presses".

 

FORMER RECIPIENTS

FLORENCE-ARIEL TREMBLAY

Florence-Ariel Tremblay is the recipient of the 4th Grant for Emerging Artists in Printmaking. Her work explores the expression of paranoia, the formation of judgment, the virtues of otherness and the interruption of the familiar. Her artistic practice seeks to break free from bidimensionality in order to present interdisciplinary installations presenting volume, superimpositions and materiality. During her residency at Atelier Circulaire, Florence will develop a project using large format relief engraving.

"This residency will be an opportunity for me to explore and experiment with the techniques and effects of relief printing. I like to take advantage of creative opportunities to take on new challenges in order to grow my practice and invest the subject in all its dimensions. I will take my explorations of the feeling of inadequacy as a starting point to examine its nuances and develop a body of images referring to the process of resolution in the face of otherness."

 

AUDREY BEAULÉ

Audrey Beaulé is the recipient of the 2021 François-Xavier Marange Grant. Her 12-month residency will allow her to explore lithography in order to create an artist's book.

" For this residency, I wish to conduct research on abstraction in Quebec in order to pursue my reflections on the link between this pictoriality and emancipation. The result will be an artist's book printed in a few copies. My triple practice of art, book and queer life relates to a research-creation where printing, writing and drawing are hybrid. In the gestures, in the know-how of the body and the hand lies all the potential of identity, material, sensitive and dialogical of the emancipation."

audreybeaule.com

ALEX POULIOT

Alex Pouliot is the recipient of the François-Xavier-Marange 2020 Grant, following which he begins a 12-month residency at Atelier Circulaire. During his residency, he wishes to explore the affective presence and narrativity of images and words through different states of matter.

"My practice investigates the affective charge and the mechanisms of production of images and memories. The photographs and texts in my personal archive are transformed through different sculptural, installation, performative and textual strategies. My research, based on my sensitive experience of the world, is driven by tensions between presence/absence - light/darkness - conservation/destruction - memory/forgetfulness - life/death. Focusing on techniques of reuse, dissimulation, fragility and erasure, my approach seeks to cultivate an ecological conception of the image, conscious of its visual footprint. »

 

alexpouliot.net

 

FANNY LATREILLE

Fanny Latreille is the recipient of the 2019 François-Xavier-Marange grant. She is beginning a 12-month residency at the Atelier Circulaire during which she will explore various printing techniques and image composition processes.

"Since 2013, I have been engaged in an approach of interpretation and transposition of archives in order to look at history. My process develops in dialogue with people, objects and archives. Borrowed images, shared testimonies and cooperation as documentary elements are the primary materials of my work, which I activate at the design stage. What I am interested in are improbable dialogues, reciprocities between authors or ideas that could not have met otherwise."

fannylatreille.com

Presentation : Saturday, September 18, 2021, at 5 pm.

JULIE BELLAVANCE

Julie Bellavance is the recipient of the 3rd Grant For Emerging Artists In Printmaking. She explores the lithographic process through a sensitive approach to the representation of natural objects. Her prints are arranged according to patterns of repetition or symmetry within devices inviting the viewer to contemplation.

"My work focuses on the ambiguous representation, but in all its subtlety, of natural elements. Thanks to the opportunity offered by Atelier Circulaire, I will focus on the production of mineral images. I will explore the composition of these images from several matrices in lithography using the combination and transparency of several colors to obtain a wide range of subtle nuances serving those visible in minerals. "

YAMINA SEKHRI

Atelier Circulaire is proud to present the winner of our 2nd edition of the Emerging Artist in Printmaking Grant: Yamina Sekhri.

Her work explores questions about identity, privacy and data confidentiality.

" I aim to untangle my memories, my secrets and my identity from the algorithms and signals of the digital era they are intertwined in. What are the patterns and symbols hidden in the daily virtual reality and how may I transfer my observations into the real world? I enjoy working step by step. I separate the image into multiple layers and I assemble them to create a coherent single final result.  Manual printing techniques are polyvalent and open the door to all sorts of possibilities of creation. Silkscreen printing is of special value to my research, for I can print on a multitude of unusual surfaces. This freedom allows me to share my thoughts with humor and honesty."

At Atelier Circulaire, Yamina will continue her project "Private Matters" with screen-printing and lithography productions.

Presentation: Saturday, Feb. 1, 2020, at 6:30 pm

JULIE OUELLET

Julie Ouellet is the latest winner of the François-Xavier Marange grant, created in collaboration with the UQAM Foundation, thanks to the generosity of a philanthropic couple, friends of Atelier Circulaire. Her work revolves around an active search in the broader field of drawing and painting.

" Through recent experiments, I try to grasp what dictates or influences the path of the hand that traces, and that is why I have determined to voluntarily set up binding and unpredictable tracing situations. It is with a view to “destabilize” my act of drawing that I plan to approach the setting and printing tools offered me by Atelier Circulaire. "

All along her journey in our studio, we will follow her project as it evolves.

NICOLAS WILLIAMS

He won the Cultural Diversity and Indigenous Communities grant. An Ojibwe / Anishnabe artist, he is interested in geometric beading, sculpture and intaglio.

I research, draw the image, then translate it on a computer and create a woven sculpture. At Atelier Circulaire I will be able to create 5 editions of my original drawings for my sculptures. I choose to specialize in intaglio because copper has been used by the Ojibwe for thousands of years."

Working at Atelier Circulaire allows Nicolas to deepen his knowledge and improve his technique, especially working alongside Paule, our intaglio coordinator. 

JEAN-MICHEL LECLERC

Winner of the grant for Emerging artists in printmaking, he works on memory, presence and the invisible through pictorial and sculptural artworks.

" First of all, I want to understand how an object, a simple substrate can be invested with a presence, contain it as much in the literal sense as in the figurative sense. What I try to capture is the essence, the imprint left by the living once it is no longer. 

At Atelier Circulaire, Jean-Michel is mainly interested in photogravure. We will closely follow the evolution of his work and his research around the use of varied archival documents.