January 1-29 2020
Le Labo is pleased to have Laura Demers, our first artist in residence of this new decade!
Bio
Laura Demers is an artist, writer, and emerging curator based in Toronto. She has exhibited her work in Ottawa, Toronto, Cambridge, and Montreal; and has written forPrefix Photo, Public Parking, Blank Cheque Press, Femme Art Review , and C Magazine , among other publications. Her work and research interests focus on ecology, technology, and feminism; she recently curated Greenhouse Effects as part of Art Spin Hamilton, and will be curating an exhibition in Sudbury as part of La Nuit émergente in 2020. The same year, Laura will complete an artist residency with Le Labo (Toronto’s Francophone Media Arts Centre), a project at Sea Foam Home (an intimate community-based series of events hosted by Ashley Culver), as well as a research/creation residency at the Centre SAGAMIE in Alma, QC in 2021.
Statement
Though formally trained in painting and drawing, Laura Demers’s artistic practice currently manifests through image, installation, and text. Her work explores issues that pertain to the various uses of natural and human-made spaces, and to ideas of (self) preservation. Her current research interests revolve around the technological mimesis of nature; her most recent installation loosely recounts the history of the creation of artificial clouds, which lead to the beginnings of weather engineering; another project, consisting of a series of screenprints, looks at ways in which interwar architecture (especially architectures of seclusion — bunkers, utopian micro-cities, fortresses, etc.) takes formal and structural cues from the protective shells of mollusks. In her writing, programming, and recent curatorial work, she further expands on themes related to nature and technology alongside like-minded feminist thinkers and artists.
