biography

Dominique Laquerre

Born in Victoriaville, 1959. She lives and works in Chesterville, Quebec.

At first, Dominique Laquerre focused on painting and drawing, but in the late-‘80s she gradually integrated installation art to her work. In 1989, she became the first Quebec visual artist to be in residence at the Na-Bolom Foundation, directed by photographer and ecologist Gertrude Blom in the State of Chiapas, Mexico. Laquerre’s artistic development came to a crossroad in 1992, when the construction of a huge power transmission line was announced without prior consultation with affected populations. This event inspired her to make an artistic contribution to the debate that was rocking her rural community, in the middle of the Appalachians. That is why she created “Échelles réduites” (Reduced Scales), a set of short-lived actions and installations co-designed with Daniel Jean, in the woods, right on the path chosen for the new pylons. These woods where she lives were thus spared and became her outdoors workshop and her main creative space. Since then, she has realized several other site-specific projects, including “L’Arbre généalogique,” “Repères” and “Lignes de vie,” all process works involving participation from rural communities. Standing at the intersection of environment art and relational practices, these long-term projects approach collective memory and humanity’s relationship with its territory from a unique angle. Since site-specific art can be short-lived and physically difficult to experience, Dominique Laquerre resorts to photography, first to document her process artworks and present them on the Internet, but also to feed her workshop production and her public artworks.

Dominique Laquerre pays special attention to experiencing a location, to Nature’s detectable cycles and to the analogies existing between forms and matter. The results yielded by her patient observations resonate strongly with human experience. Laquerre’s works are extremely detailed; they force us to slow down and notice how we look at what is around us, to discover again the poetic charge found in simple, strongly evocative pictures.

An interdisciplinary artist, Dominique Laquerre has presented several solo and collective exhibitions in Quebec, Mexico and France. She also lectures and writes. Since 1989, she has created close to a dozen artworks for public buildings in Quebec and received grants from the governments of Quebec and Canada. Laquerre’s works have been featured at the “Coup de cœur” of the 1990 Montreal show “Entrée libre à l’art contemporain” and in the exhibition and book “Oeuvres d’arbres” presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Pau (France), in 2001. In 1998 and 2006, Laquerre received the Creation Award of the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, category Centre-du-Québec.

Translated by François Couture

 [pdf] version of the resume