_Bio A native of Tracadie, New Brunswick, Noémie DesRoches holds a bachelor’s degree in visual art from the Université de Moncton, city where she teaches art while continuing her own practice. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and the Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen. It has also been published in several journals, including the magazine FR: Arts visuels de la francophonie canadienne in 2021.
_Approach Noémie DesRoches’ artistic practice is based mainly on the malleability of memory and the role of the image in the construction of identity. Using documents, discourses and photographs drawn mostly from her family heritage, she employs painting to create new representations. Through reframing, modifying the faces or eliminating certain elements of the images she selects, DesRoches alters these mementos and transforms them into fictive vestiges. By manipulating her family’s stories, she illustrates the distortion of what is forgotten or remembered, in addition to highlighting the limits of memory.
_Project DesRoches’ project, continuing in the vein of Ce qu’il reste de toi (2022), will be constructed around a photo album found by chance. Using photographs selected as references, she will paint three new stratified portraits, obtained by means of superimposing several layers of polyester film. As these works are being composed, she will use paint to repeat, modify, alternate or conceal some segments of the selected images in order to deflect them from their original references. Through this process of alteration, DesRoches will seek to underscore the ambiguity of forgetting and remembering, in addition to interrogating their connection to inherited artefacts and to the construction of identity.
Photo credits : courtesy of the artist