Exposition
Vernissage
Ombre portée
artch – art contemporain émergent and the Musée d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul are pleased to present the third exhibition in the Plein solo project, highlighting Geneviève Dagenais‘ first solo exhibition. Ombre portée runs from June 21 to August 29, 2025 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul.
Join us in celebrating the exhibition’s grand opening at the vernissage on Saturday, June 21, 2025, from 2 pm!
Through Plein solo, six solo exhibitions will take place between January 2025 and March 2026, offering a panorama of emerging contemporary creation across the province.
Plein solo is made possible with the financial support of the Quebec government.
Geneviève Dagenais’s new series of sculptures tells the story of movement and the encounter of bodies with each other and with space. Using a video recording of her own performative body exploration, Dagenais investigates the movement of her own body. She pays particular attention to the contacts between her hands and arms, their relationship, and the negative spaces generated by their interactions.
She then extracts a series of freeze-frames from the video, capturing moments of entanglement when bodies and limbs intertwine to suggest new forms.
Like cast shadows, these flat images are transposed, becoming the basis of a fabric pattern that in turn becomes a mold, a kind of garment now ready to receive a clay casting. In this way, the artist creates half-organic, half-human forms, the result of movements frozen in time.
Like flesh marked by the scars that have forged it over time, the sculptures created by Dagenais retain the imprints of the textile’s seams and folds. The artist brings them into relief, honoring the memory of the material and the body, the legacy of the ordeals that have shaped them as witnesses to a process of transformation.
Combining meticulous textile work to create the mold with the intensity of high-temperature firing to render a malleable material – clay – solid, the artist transforms the stealth of bodily movement into a tangible, immutable object. Dagenais’ works skilfully explore the intersection of opposing concepts, from rigidity to suppleness, from permanence to ephemerality.
21. 06. 2025
29. 08. 2025
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Musée d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul
23 Rue Ambroise Fafard, Baie-Saint-Paul, QC G3Z 2J2
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Sculptor Geneviève Dagenais explores notions of imprint and transmutation through ceramics and textiles. She examines the affective and sensory charges of these media to elicit a carnal experience of the objects. Inspired by somatic approaches, Geneviève draws on the psycho-affective and physical dimensions of form and material to establish a dialogue between the sculptural object and the body. She activates our sensory memories through tactile, olfactory and kinaesthetic perceptions. By manipulating materials in their transitory states – between rigidity and malleability, permanence and ephemerality – she uses sewing and molding to capture the imprint of what has been, bearing witness to the passages between what transforms and what remains.
Geneviève transcribes fleeting, mutable fragments of human experience and the impact of time on the body. She reveals living experiences inscribed in the folds and tensions of surfaces. Through her somatosensory approach, she links together the tangible and intangible, the carnal and memory, to bring out sensitive relationships between body and matter.
Geneviève Dagenais
Originally from the Laurentides, Geneviève Dagenais now lives in Montreal and is pursuing her Master’s degree in Fine Arts (Sculpture and Ceramics) at Concordia University.