From December 14, 2023 to April 7, 2024

Gabrielle Bélanger is an artist of proximity whose work is a dialogue between intimate creative moments and collaborative projects involving the community. With an academic background in social work, the visual arts and sexology, she is the artist behind La Carriole, a mobile screen printing workshop that has been travelling around the territory since 2018. A recipient of grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) and from Première Ovation, Bélanger has undertaken a number of residencies in various communities, as well as at some artists’ centres. She exhibits her work at solo shows, off-site venues and through performance art.

Through her artistic practice, she transforms spaces (interior and exterior) that are marginal, interpreting them as legitimate places to live in, and to live in ourselves. Interaction is the key to her creative, artistic approach. She injects herself into a specific scene, partly as an “observer” and partly as an “actor”, interconnecting with other people in the community. Creation imposes itself on her as a way of taking her place in the world, of putting up resistance.

With the exhibition D’un slow à notre ronde, Bélanger returns to the schoolyard of her childhood days, inviting first and second-year high school students from École l’Odyssée to participate in the project. Mon premier slow, an intimate work, was the outcome of a (self-directed) residency that involved going around schoolyards situated in the Côte-Nord, throughout the summer of 2020. This video, showing the artist spinning alone on a piece of playground equipment, addresses the issue of the challenging gaze of others. Finally, there is Notre ronde – the result of the collaboration with the Odyssée students. Bélanger worked on the project during a month and a half’s residency at the school, as well as at the Studio B-12 Hangar.