Marie-Josée Laframboise was born in Quebec City and lives and works in Montreal. She obtained a BFA from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) in 1987 and an MFA from Concordia University in 2002. In 2000, while she was studying for her MFA, she participated in an international exchange at the Glasgow School of Arts. Her works have been presented as part of solo and group exhibitions, notably at the Ottawa Art Gallery, Musée d’art de Joliette, Centre de diffusion et de production de la photographie VU, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Le Quartier; Centre d’art contemporain (Quimper), Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (Nice), Kunstraum Dornbirn (Autriche), Musée régional de Rimouski, Centre d’art contemporain (Bruxelles), Galerie de l’UQAM, Langage Plus, CIRCA, Espace-musée de Québécor, Grenfell Campus Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

Her works are part of major private and public collections, such as the Prêt d’oeuvres d’art of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art de Joliette, the Cirque du Soleil collection as well as the Fondation Christoph Merian, in Switzerland.

My sculptural approach mainly takes the form of in situ installations that construct, draw, configure or capture a territory, taking advantage of the extent of the site, its constraints, the material used and the resources present on site. My installations can also be understood from a graphical point of view, insofar as they come directly from the act of tracing, on a surface, figures of elements in a network, sometimes referring to the structures of mathematical systems such as the points of inflection and cusp, the vector or the Bézier curve. The wire, the tube, the net, the segments of hoops come to fill the places, while the grafted materials to the walls of the exhibition space - wall, ceiling, column, beam, ground - create unusual courses, inviting us to circulate inside structures or, on the contrary, to avoid certain pre-established places of passage.

In dialogue with my research on spatial appropriation and the networking of multiple subjects, my drawing practice, always rooted in the questioning of space, explores and extends the concept of the network. Especially in recent drawings, visual elements from an industrial context are integrated into abstract compositions where references to reality coexist with geometric figures. In the same vein, my research also involves photographing electrical cables that compartmentalize and hatch the landscape of our everyday environment. These entanglements of threads, captured from different angles, become complex compositions that reveal linear networks that we usually pay little attention to.

Marie-Josée Laframboise

Visit her web site mariejoseelaframboise.com