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ABOUT...
Anne-Marie Giroux is a Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist. Her practice focuses on the visual arts, although previously she worked primarily in the intersection of contemporary dance, sculpture, film, and art video. She earned her BFA from Concordia University and is a provincially and nationally awarded artist. Although she is now immersed in a different form of expression, certain central concerns remain constant. Giroux is interested in poetic expression that, beyond the specifics of pictorial or sculptural work, allows her to lay the groundwork for formal explorations. At the heart of her artistic research is her engagement in the relationship between "body, object, material, being or states of being and movement" what she calls “body matter”. Prior observations through movement practices, are now pursued through painting and sculpture-installation.
As a choreographer - performer - film director and videographer, she has first co-directed, with Sylvain Delisle, Roland Goguen and Marlene Millar, the art video LE TOIT. Broadcasted in Montréal, France, Belgium and Spain, the art video was awarded a Special Jury Mention at the Festival International Cidade de Vigo in Spain in 1993. In 1995, she created and performed on stage the solo work PASSAGE, a work combining dance, sculpture and film. In 1997, she cocreated the work MODULUS 5 in close collaboration with visual artist painter and sculptor Jérôme Poirier. Combining dance and sculpture, the work was performed on stage by both artists. In 1999 she began to create AUBE ET CRÉPUSCULE, a work combining dance, sculpture and sound. Performed by dancers Rachel Harris, Robert Meilleur and Maya Ostrofsky, AUBE ET CRÉPUSCULE was premiered in Montreal at Studio de l'Agora de la Danse in November 2001.
In 2010, following a trip in China in the city of Kaifeng, she created two series of paintings entitled ROUGE and KAIFENG, CHINA. Without following a specific theme for those works, she oriented her research through the exploration of the multiple interpretations inspired by the same subject.
In 2011, Giroux undertook the projects SI UN ARBRE J’ÉTAIS and FORÊT MORTE. Greatly inspired by the Abitibi forest in northern Québec, she created works in two and three dimensions developed from traditional mediums, as well as from recycled materials. With the first series, SI UN ARBRE J’ÉTAIS, she merges the body and wood material in an abstraction that evokes more of a state of being than a figurative representation. She seems to isolate a fragment of the body in movement that abandons its usual aesthetic to take on the appearance of something plant-like. In these self-portraits, the being and the natural element become one. In the second series, the artist presents a series of still life, composed of painted forests, remnants of the Abitibi woods and objects found on the street. FORÊT MORTE evokes more the idea of the potential vulnerability of the forest: a powerful presence that could someday be weakened or completely disappear. The series SI UN ARBRE J'ÉTAIS can refer both to a past or present state of the body while the series FORÊT MORTE tends toward what has already lived, already existed.
Since 2014, the artist is working on two project entitled DÉRIVE ( DRIFT ) and À LA DÉRIVE ( DRIFTING ). Those two projects are currently a work in progress. With the first project DÉRIVE ( DRIFT ) the artist seeks to evoke a chaotic universe where the drift of the human being is expressed in an abstract, poetic and symbolic way. Through an evolving concept, she merges the body and matter in an abstract and symbolic poetry, where the play of bright and cheerful colors comes in contrast with the critical view of the human drift gradually revealed through the creative process. Here, body and matter are interrelated in a gear which neither one nor the other, can not disengage. The second project À LA DÉRIVE ( DRIFTING ) began in 2017. Combining humor, poetry and sarcasm, she explores themes, references, subjects or objects that resonate with her in the studio and that are integral part of her daily creative process.
Giroux has exhibited in the cities of New York, Detroit, Montreal, Miami and Toronto. She has work in public and private collections, notably at MONA Museum of New Art in Detroit.