BIO
Jean-Michel Leclerc holds a master’s degree in fine arts from Concordia University and a bachelor’s degree in visual and media art from the Université du Québec à Montréal. In 2017, he won the Sylvie and Simon Blais Award for Emerging Visual Artists. His work has been exhibited in Québec, Toronto and Baltimore and can be found in private collections in Canada and Europe.
ARTISTIC PRACTICE
Jean-Michel Leclerc wishes to understand how an object, a mere support, can be invested with a presence, can contain presence in a literal and figurative sense. Using means as simple as possible, his work acts like a space for exploring and shaping memory and the invisible. Various events and fragments of archives are seen as erased and latent paths carrying within them the possibility of becoming physically manifest. Leclerc strives to bring together and study these fragments in order to propose a different vision of history and the passage of time. This leads him to develop new strategies for appropriating and transmuting the archive and for developing his artistic practice using tools found at the crossroads of ethnology and history.
PROJECT
Jean-Michel Leclerc’s project examines, through made, recreated or repaired objects, the concepts value, wealth and care. He intends to create a series of sculptural works by drawing on a variety of popular periodicals, encyclopaedia and books on home economics published before the late 1940s. Through these works, he will take up questions around the appropriation of traditional techniques, “jury-rigging” and resourcefulness in the rural Québec domestic experience.
These objects will then be used to create a series of pen and ink drawings reminiscent of certain offset printing techniques used in the books consulted. The artist wishes to engage the public in a dialogue around the questions raised by his work and by the traditional techniques he will draw on.
