2022 PAPIER art fair

Shuvinai Ashoona lives and works in Kinngait, Nunavut. Her drawings imagine the past and present fused into a prophetic future of hybrid creatures, women birthing worlds, and mystical or other-worldly landscapes, clearly inspired by the land of her northern home. Her work is currently included in the central exhibition of the Venice Biennial “The Milk of Dreams”.

Allie Gattor’s creative process begins with the observation of everyday life. While her work is reminiscent of children’s booksillustrations, Allie Gattor’s work is cathartic and can be surprising due to their combination of cheeky feminism and dark humour. Her drawings touch upon themes such as anxiety, depression, isolation, human relations, and the absurdity of the human condition, always with a playful touch.

Through his artworks, Moridja Kitenge Banza intentionally confuses reality and fiction in order to disrupt hegemonic narratives and to create spaces where marginal discourse can exist.”  Canadian Congolese aritst Kitenge Banza was born in Kinshasa in 1980. The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is currently presenting a solo exhibition of his work.

Now installed on one of the slopes of Mount Saint-Hilaire, David Lafrance’s studio expands beyond its walls. He laid out a monumental garden, a real work of “land art”, from which he now draws inspiration for his paintings. This region, that once inspired painters such as Ozias Leduc and Paul-Émile Borduas, is now at the heart of Lafrance’s work, who observes it closely and in real-time.

Born in Haiti, Manuel Mathieu is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. He is best known for his vibrant, colourful paintings, which deftly merge abstraction and figuration. His paintings and installations combine personal memories with thoughts on Haiti’s complex history, and reflect an instability of form and a sense of pareidolia. In 2020 , Mathieu was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and The Power Plant (Toronto). The Longlati Foundation (Beijing) and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami will present solo exhibitions of his work in 2022-2024.

Alain Paiement researches the possibilities of how photography unfolds through time and space and translates this into images. Through installation, photo series, and video, Paiement experiments with perspective, telescopic views and lenses, as well as scanning, to explore the constantly changing relationship between the subject, its gaze and its environment. The new body of works presented at Papier underlies an ecological reflection.

Karen Tam is a Montréal artist whose research focuses on the constructions and imaginations of cultures through sculptures, banners and installations in which she recreates the spaces of Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, opium dens, curio shops and other sites of cultural encounters. Her most recent installation was exhibited in the Manif d’art 10, at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.