Sunday October 28th at 3 p.m., the artist Annie Charland Thibodeau, who has been staying at the Hafnarborg Artist Residency for the month of October, will talk about her work and stay in Iceland, as the end of her visit draws near. The event is in English, free and open to everyone.
Through sculpture and installation, Annie Charland Thibodeau constructs vast spaces of contemplation where altered forms coexist and enter into dialogue. The process begins intuitively with a gathering of raw materials and then takes shape through the repetition of the countless small, precise actions that together form a process. By transforming materials, she transforms their presence in space and articulates a system that is at once rigid and poetic.
The relationship between the altered forms and their new environment becomes the very subject of her work. She ponders the many interactive systems (shape, light, space) that arise between the various elements.
In the resulting simple, minimalist installations, familiarity builds transitions and bridges the gap between viewer and artwork. In the way transformed objects inhabit space, the notion of territory materializes simultaneously in two different spaces: the material exhibition space and the psychic space in the spectator’s mind.
For years now, she has been drawn to vast wide-open spaces and this very quest brought her to Iceland for an artist residency. Embracing a poetic, contemplative mode, her project developed organically over a series of explorations of the Icelandic landscape and a gathering of natural objects.
Her practice unfolds over thresholds both physical and imaginary. By repurposing and transforming these gathered geological artifacts through photography, she brings fraught objects into relief, situated at the outer limits of the recognizable, like mirages.
Annie Charland Thibodeau lives and works in Quebec City (Quebec), where she studied sculpture. Her work has been presented in various events and solo exhibitions in Quebec, notably at the Centre Bang (Chicoutimi) at the Centre Regart (Lévis), at AXENÉO7 (Gatineau) and at the Sherbrooke Museum of Fine Arts. She has also participated in residency programs in Ireland (2015) and Italy (2016) and now takes part in the Artist-in-Residence program at Hafnarborg – the Hafnarfjörður Centre of Culture and Fine Art.
Acknowledgments to the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Les récollets-bâtisseurs and Les Offices jeunesse internationaux du Québec for their financial support.