about
bio
Crédit : Alex Tran
Since the 1990s, Claudette Lemay has been developing a body of work encompassing video, audio, photographic, and installation art. Her work has been featured in both group and solo exhibitions on national and international stages (Mexico, France, Finland) and has been showcased in numerous festivals worldwide. In 2011, she completed a master’s degree in visual and media arts at UQAM. She is a member of the artist-run center perte de signal, the Chaufferie/Cooperative Lezarts, and La Traversée, atelier de géopoétique. Originally from Quebec City, she lives and works in Montreal.
cv (pdf)
mémoire création, maîtrise (pdf)
dossier de presse (pdf)
artistic statement
Claudette Lemay has explored the poetic subtleties of everyday life and the natural and built environment for over 25 years. Through an experimental, multidisciplinary approach that combines video, photography, drawing, sound art, and printmaking, she engages her intuition, imagination, and contemplation to develop a sensitive, even intimate, connection with the subjects of her work.
Active in the visual arts milieu since 1998, Lemay initially worked in the field of experimental video, delving into the evocative potential of images, the body, and sound. This exploration led to an interest in image-construction processes, language, voice, translation, and audio description for visually impaired audiences. Concepts of interpretation and invention thus became integral to her practice as they merged with the themes of presence and temporality that are central to her projects.
Slowness and chance guide her creative process, drawing her attention to both subtle and vital nuances that disrupt the ordinary. Encounters and exchanges with her surroundings shape the evolution of her projects, in which she narrates, so to speak, the events and non-events that punctuate her life. Lemay is fascinated by the material and immaterial traces of the passage of time.
Lemay’s projects reflect a performative and meditative approach in which her entire body is absorbed in the creative process. Gesture and collecting play a pivotal role and imbue her works with spontaneity, like unexpected pauses in the flow of daily life. Through her collections—drawings made from stone rubbings, found playing cards from her travels, impromptu video sequences—she chronicles the various journeys she documents.
In her recent projects, Lemay has turned to material experimentation to explore new ways of working with images. Just as the act of collecting enriches the creative process by multiplying her source images and narratives, the materiality of printmaking enables her to explore repetition and transfer from a fresh perspective.