3 Concordia artists you should know

“The way we relate to the world” is a primary theme for visual artist Josée Pedneault, who recently completed a residency at Japan’s Tokyo Wonder Site thanks to an award from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Working in photography and mixed media such as painting, drawing and sculpture, Pedneault explores “the delicate structure of universal connections, seeking to understand the invisible links that exist between ourselves and the world,” she writes in her artist statement. “The work results in installations exploring recurrent themes reflecting on the human experience: the existential quest, the process of adaptation, and the notion of fate.”

Her public art projects include a permanent artwork in the McGill University Health Centre: Annedda is five murals of black-and-white photographs on ceramic tiles.

She explains on her website that the name of the work means “‘tree of life’ in the language of Stadaconé, an American first nation [which] disappeared 60 years following Jacques Cartier’s travel to Canada.”

Pedneault won Toronto’s CONTACT Photography Festival’s Portfolio Reviews Exhibition Award in 2015, and has also completed residencies in Iceland, Mexico, France and Poland.

Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Sara A. Tremblay left a gigantic concrete, sphere-shaped sculpture on Brännö Island in Sweden, and documented her Swedish rock collection in a video series — because she couldn’t bring the stones back home to Canada.

This speaks volumes about Tremblay’s practice, which includes drawing, painting, performance and sculpture as well as photography and video — her “documentation” tools.

“By gathering and documenting objects, ephemeral actions, interventions and transformations, I leave marks, I take notes and the photographic document acts as a record,” she writes in her artist statement. Tremblay plays with natural materials like “rock, fossil, stone, wind; even humans, animals and seasons.”

With her debut photography book, Själsö, set for this fall, Tremblay is inspired by travel, people and places, “often leading to projects closely associated with the specificities of those places,” the artist writes.

This summer, as part of the Mission photographique organized by Les Rencontres Internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie, she’s embarking on a 650-kilometre hike “to document the contemporary Gaspésie landscape,” Tremblay says.

She feels that living outside for two months will allow her to “experience landscape in its purest form."

Her exhibitions have included a solo show at Toronto’s YYZ Artists’ Outlet; the creation and exhibition residency Études, in collaboration with Manon DePauw, at the Guido Molinari Fondation in Montreal; and the solo show Éphémérides at the Galerie Donald Browne in Montreal.

In addition to the Brucebo Fine Art Summer Residency Scholarship she completed in Sweden in 2013, Tremblay also earned the first Yvonne-L.-Bombardier Arts Scholarship in 2014.

The internet is an important muse for John Player, a Montreal-based painter.

Player turns to the World Wide Web to source images from “mass media, newspapers and archives found largely on the internet,” he says in his artist statement, as he “attempts a critique of the contemporary spectacle of dominant culture and its power structures.”

Player’s work has been exhibited in Canada and the United States, including at a solo show at VOLTA 2014 in New York City. Represented by Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain, he “responds to current events,” he explains, using “an intuitive selection of news media.”

Yet rather than being journalistic or specific in nature, Player’s work speaks through restrained observation.

“The aesthetic of a helicopter shot is a point of view we see in newspapers,” explains the artist. “Or the view from above; we see it on news programming but it’s also kind of surveillance of the Earth.”

Born in Victoria, B.C., Player has completed residencies in Vermont, Baie Saint-Paul, Que., and the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, under the Quebec Artist in Residence agreement.