Exhibition Dates: September 6 – October 18
Opening Reception: Friday September 13 @ 5 – 8pm
Artist Demo Workshop: Saturday September 14 @ 1pm at Martha Street Studio
This workshop is free to attend and open to the public.
Exhibition Text by Bronwyn Watson
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Martha Street Studio is pleased to present Within the Wider Landscape, a solo exhibition by Cassandre Boucher (FRA).
Having grown up in the forests of the St. Lawrence Lowlands, and now living in the heart of urban density in Paris, Cassandre Boucher reflects on the connections that unite human and nature. For the exhibition Within the Wider Landscape, she blends printed works and woven textiles to evoke contact with nature as a source of sensory and emotional experiences.
Delicate, colored papers with diaphanous transparency sit alongside wide-meshed textiles that allow light to pass through. Folded and crumpled, sometimes torn, intertwined, and hand-woven in other places, they reveal fragments of photographic images. A wayward tree has fallen across the road; hands begin their weaving; the field of flowers has become a drape. Within the Wider Landscape calls for slow contemplation and introspection. It is an invitation to dive into our memories and consider the natural spaces that surround us in their entirety as places of interaction and interdependence, rather than simply as a resource to be controlled and exploited.
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I am interested in the temporal and emotional relationships that link human beings to their environments. I pursue a protean approach to textile arts where weaving, etching, and the pictorial possibilities of screen printing are combined and utilized within both two-dimensional and installation-based works. Driven by an interest in nature as well as traditional methodologies of craft and labour, I draw inspiration from recent social histories and the rural Quebec surroundings in which I grew up, in order to imagine alternative relationships between manual labour and our natural world. Through an eco-feminist approach, I consider the notions and implications of time and repetition inherent to the production of textile arts as tools to examine and address the conventional relationships of exploitation and domination by Western societies.
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Cassandre Boucher (she, her, hers) is a Canadian visual artist living and working in Paris (France). She holds a Bachelor of Visual & Media Arts, and a Master’s Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education, both from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM, Canada). She also holds a Master’s of Fine Arts in Printed Image from the École des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD, Paris). Her work has been exhibited across Canada, as well as in France, Portugal and Switzerland. She has held residencies at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, USA), The Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós, Iceland), and Villa Belleville (Paris, France). Her work has received support from both the Quebec Council for the Arts, and the Canadian Council for the Arts. In 2023, she received the Grand Jury Prize of the Trois-Rivières’ Printmaking Biennale (Canada), and in 2024, received the Lieux-Communs Prize, awarded by the art centre Lieux-Communs in Namur (Belgium).
Instagram @cassandre.boucher_