Grand-Métis, Québec, August 9, 2024 – The International Garden Festival is proud to unveil the four winners of the 2024 RBC Residencies at La Maison d’Ariane. The residency program is funded by the RBC Emerging Artists program of the Royal Bank of Canada to contribute to the development of the talents of tomorrow and to assist organizations that offer opportunities to young artists to advance their careers.
From August 12 to September 9, the Métis-sur-Mer cottage will be the artistic home to Valérie Cain Bourget and Angelina Guo. They will be succeeded by Clara Vecchio and Naghmeh Sharifi, who will take up residence from September 9 to October 7.
The public will be invited to visit La Maison d'Ariane and meet its occupants on two Open House events: on Thursday August 22 and Thursday September 26, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Summer Residency · August 12 – September 8, 2024 ·
Valérie Cain Bourget · visual arts ·
Born and raised in the Gaspé Peninsula, Valérie Cain Bourget now lives in Quebec City. Her work explores the notions of “makeshift” and interior worlds, as well as rural communities' connection to the land. During her residency at La Maison d’Ariane, she intends to investigate both our memories and our surroundings by generating a sensitive map of the community members’ favourite childhood natural play spaces.
Angelina Guo · poetry ·
Angelina Guo is a Montreal-born writer of Chinese descent. In the fall of 2023, she moved to Paris to pursue a master's in literature at the Sorbonne and the École normale supérieure. With the help of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, she is currently working on a thesis on cultural identity among French-speaking Vietnamese authors. Her poetry projects delve into multilingualism, migration and social inequalities.
Fall Residency · September 9 – October 7, 2024 ·
Clara Vecchio · youth literature ·
Clara Vecchio is a graduate of the Conservatoire d'art dramatique de Québec. As a queer and neurodivergent artist, her mission is to use theater as a tool for popular awareness. In Sarajevo in 2018, she directed the play Kids, by Fabrice Melquiot, in co-production with the Sarajevo Youth Theatre. A year later, she presented La dyslexie c'est dure à écrire pour une dyslexique at the Fringe Festival. In 2023, she co-wrote and starred in Chip show: l'enquête croustillante at Théâtre de La Bordée, she played Fred in Les Fabuleuses (a play by Pierre-Olivier Roussel presented at Théâtre Premier acte) and wrote Pissenlit, a play for young audiences presented by Théâtre en Quartier. She is a cast member of L’Arrière Scène’s upcoming production.
Naghmeh Sharifi · visual arts ·
Naghmeh Sharifi is an Iranian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Tio'tia:ke / Montréal. Her practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculptural installations, animation and video. Her academic background in psychology and visual arts highlight her fascination with the psychology of the body – its ability to be a place of memory, and as a shell for our presence in the world. Formally trained as a painter, her latest projects have traversed into time-based media in response to her evolving subject matters. Her work has been exhibited in Iran, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, the United States, Canada and Macedonia. In Montreal, she has shown her work in numerous artistic venues, including the PHI Centre and the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels).
Jury A total of 74 applications were submitted as part of the 2024 call for proposals. This year’s jury was composed of naakita f.k. (multidisciplinary artist), Laurence Veilleux (poet), Ruby Thélot (Board Treasurer, International Garden Festival; designer, cyberethnographer, artist; Founder, 13101401 inc.; Adjunct Professor, Integrated Design & Media, New York University), and Ève De Garie-Lamanque (Artistic Director, International Garden Festival).
About La Maison d’Ariane The mission of La Maison d’Ariane is to welcome architects, landscape architects and artists of all artistic and cultural disciplines from here and from abroad for residencies outside of an urban context. It aims to establish a laboratory for experimentation and research that stimulates the creation, invention and imagination of the artists it welcomes and connects. The main drivers that guide its actions, both for the creators and for the communities and organizations it serves, are dialogue and exchanges, meetings and sharing.
About the International Garden Festival The International Garden Festival is recognized as one of the most important contemporary garden festivals in North America. Since its inception in 2000, more than 180 contemporary gardens have been exhibited at Grand-Métis and as extramural projects in Canada and around the world. Presented at Les Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens, at the gateway to the Gaspé Peninsula, the Festival is held on a site adjacent to the historic gardens created by Elsie Reford, thereby establishing a bridge between history and modernity, and a dialogue between conservation, tradition and innovation.
Each year the Festival exhibits over 20 conceptual gardens created by more than 70 landscape architects, architects and designers from various disciplines. Over the years, the Festival has received numerous distinctions, including the Prix Hector-Fabre in 2007, given out every two years by the Ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie of Québec to an organization that has contributed to the international renown of its region. Since 2019, the Festival administers both La Maison d’Ariane and its artist residency program.
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Source: Ève De Garie-Lamanque Artistic Director