Florence Viau

Florence Viau is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. She holds a bachelor’s degree in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in sculpture at ConcordiaUniversity. Her residency at Est-Nord-Est allowed her to concentrate on preparing for a solo exhibition to be presented at the Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent as part of Plein solo, a project supported by artch.

Working mainly in sculpture and painting, Viau explores systems of representation related to archaeology, ecology, science, and science fiction. She is curious about the origin of tools and the fabrication of images in different eras and with different technologies, and her research is as much an excavation of the past as an analysis of how we envisage the future.

For Viau, the residency at Est-Nord-Est offered an opportunity to come into resonance with the call of the outdoors, to explore what that environment might offer. Connecting herself to the natural environment of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, she was attentive to the changes of season and learned to form a bond with the land. She examined the ground and began to study the river silt, with which she began to use as a material, focusing on its texture, colour and sediments. She contemplated its sheen and wondered about how to extract colour from it. She listened to sounds – the rush of the wind – and watched birds flying. Developing a relationship of research and exploration with materials and colours, she aimed to return to basics and make new discoveries.

Viau’s studio at Est-Nord-Est reflected the extent of her research: it contained projects that were completed and underway, colour tests, materials transformed to create the illusion of different materialities. Notes, diagrams, and ideas were stuck to the wall, and on her work table different books (by Tim Ingold, Donna Haraway, Josianne Poirier, and other authors) were open and annotated. As if in a laboratory, what she had gathered was carefully inventoried. Different samples (rocks, pieces of glass polished by the river, plastic, paper, and various natural elements) were sorted by category and by colour. She seemed to have chosen each of these fragments to forge a path toward the creation of artworks that would convey, in short, her insatiable curiosity.