BIOGRAPHY
Catherine Bolduc is a visual artist born in Canada (Quebec), currently living and working in Montreal and Val-Morin. Her work has been presented in many exhibitions, both locally and abroad (Japan, Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and USA). In 2007-2008, she carried out a residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and in 2010 at the Studio du Québec in Tokyo. The winner of the Powerhouse Prize in 2013, she has also received many grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Quebec Council for the Arts throughout her career. In addition to close to a dozen public art projects, the artist has also created works that have been acquired by major private and public collections (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, National Bank Collection, Desjardins Collection, among others).
ARTIST STATEMENT
In her artistic practice, Catherine Bolduc takes an interest in the way the psyche interprets the real by projecting its desires on it, and by transgressing it through idealization and fantasizing. The outside world is here viewed as a subjective mental construction in which memory, whether individual or collective, influences perception and where fiction and reality merge. Drawing both on the autobiographical and autofictional, Bolduc's explorations share elements of the travel story or childhood recollections as well as of dreamscapes or hypnotic wanderings. Presented as large-scale installations or as interventions on paper, these works alternate between the domestic and the cosmic, the sublime and the apocalyptic, in which magic shows another reverse side. By way of her themes, the motifs and materials used (decorative, kitsch, cosmetic), and a self-assumed reclaiming of affect (emotion and the romanticism), Bolduc takes a feminist stance in her practice.