Caroline Mauxion, Peu n'est pas rien, 2015
Montréal, May 12, 2015 – The Sylvie and Simon Blais Foundation is pleased to announce the name of the recipient of the 2015 Sylvie and Simon Blais Award for Emerging Visual Artists, Caroline Mauxion, a student in the Université du Québec à Montréal’s master’s degree program in Visual and Media Arts. The Foundation would also like to mention the names of the two other finalists for this seventh consecutive edition of the Award, Maryse Goudreau (from Concordia) and Marie-Eve Martel (from UQÀM), as well as point out the excellent quality of all the work and proposed exhibition projects in support of the applications submitted, which only made the jury’s deliberations that more difficult.
Focusing on what is real within the fleeting and ephemeral, Caroline Mauxion uses the medium of photography and the technique of mise en abyme to examine the nature and status of the image and explore what it can simulate or dissemble. She therefore photographs the unpredictable events that take place during the creation of her artistic projects—a sheet of paper coming undone from the wall it was stuck on, trial prints and layouts, and so on. Her works establish a dialogue between images and their place of production. At the end of the process, her arrangements of them are rephotographed in the exhibition space, bringing it into the image to become the subject. As its paper incarnation gives it the attributes of a physically manipulable object, here the image does not simply amount to its iconic intent.
The members of the jury—Eve-Lyne Beaudry, curator of Contemporary Art at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Jean-Sébastien Denis, artist, Mona Hakim, art historian and independent curator, Danny Pagé, collector, and Simon Blais, President of the Sylvie and Simon Blais Foundation—met to select the recipient of the Award on May 4. An exhibition of works by Caroline Mauxion will be held at Galerie Simon Blais in August 2015.
