Exhibitions/Installations
Nattages (2022)
Solo exhibition at the Saint John Art Center, Saint John, New Brunswick, March-April 2022
Documentation : Mathieu Léger
Epistola (2019)
Group exhibition within the framework of the Frye Festival (2019) in collaboration with the author Sylvain Rivard. This installation was inspired by a snail mail correspondence with Rivard.
Documentation : Annie France Noël
À Cheval (2018) - Images Rémanentes
Alisa Arsenault’s project reflects on and interprets the great friendship between the artists Yvon Gallant and Nancy Morin, the influence of this friendship on them individually and on their artistic practices, their exceptional symbiosis, and their shared connection to the city of Moncton. Using excerpts of texts from sources such as the archives of each artist, Arsenault traces the artists’ everyday route from Robinson Court to the Aberdeen Cultural Centre, thereby creating a symbolic map of the physical and emotional paths they travelled together.
The routes are printed on seven Plexiglas panels installed at the Aberdeen Cultural Centre, near the former studio of Gallant and Morin that, in 2018, is notably occupied by Arsenault, among others. Three panels are devoted to each artist individually, with the seventh illustrating the encounter with the myth of each artist, the meeting of the inner world and the external world, and the fulfillment that resulted.
This concept of rapture is borrowed from the work of the philosopher Joseph Campbell: it describes the quest for a sensation of ecstasy or fullness made possible when equilibrium is achieved between the inner world (Morin) and the outer world (Gallant). The harmonious equilibrium between the two worlds in this seventh panel comes to symbolize the symbiosis between the two artists.
Part of the work has been integrated into the city’s downtown—the central panel that shows the encounter between the two artists’ universes. The itinerary is engraved on a stone in Robinson Court that bears the inscription “ROBINSON,” marking the importance of this place for these two individuals during these influential and memorable years of their friendship.
The artist would like to thank Mathieu Leblanc, Angèle Cormier, Jennifer Bélanger and Guy Arsenault for their contributions to the project
Documentation : Mathieu Léger
Histoires de souche & other family stories (2019)
Each of us carries a family photo album in our minds: images of moments, gestures and people, both real and imagined, that have occupied our past and inhabit our present. From these images it is possible to construct an identity, although fluid and ever-changing, based on this personal album. The artists presented in Histoires de souche & other family stories…, Marie Hélène Allain and Alisa Arsenault, are concerned with these elements of the past, the moments and people that have shaped them, and by the construction of family histories. In its subtleties, this exhibition also speaks of absences. It suggests marks and traces that these absences have left behind and that exist in memory, in the form of souvenirs or inventions, or both.
Photos : Annie France Noël
Documentation : Mathieu Léger
To keep just one lock of hair; or saving many hours of gathering memories (2013)
Imago artist-run print studio offers an annual bursary to a candidate who has earned their Bachelors in Fine Arts from Mount Allison University or l’Université de Moncton within the past five years. This bursary enables young artists to continue their practice in contemporary printmaking in New-Brunswick.
Through the deconstruction of images and words found within her personal family videos and the material or performative reconstitution of segments of her history, the artist questions inherited narratives. Segmented and semi-reconstituted, these locks of memories form a melancholic yet humorous whole to serve as an antidote to a universal nostalgia.