18 March 2025-27 November 2025
Imaginarium is an artistic project designed to offer young people, aged 12 to 15, living in vulnerable situations a unique opportunity to express themselves, explore their creativity and develop their self-confidence.
In collaboration with the Centre de réadaptation Le Gouvernail and the Caisse d’économie solidaire, we will be running two sessions of eight artistic workshops at the Rivage unit. Led by professional artist Josée Landry Sirois, and accompanied by three guest artists, these workshops will enable participants to discover a wide variety of contemporary art practices. Each guest artist will share his or her background, techniques and universe, creating rich and inspiring moments of exchange.
Imaginarium’s aim is to introduce young people to contemporary art, while fostering the development of their social skills and boosting their self-esteem. Through this experience, they can broaden their vision of the world, open up to new perspectives and find tools to express their creativity.
The project will culminate in an exhibition, where the young people’s creations will be presented in a festive and rewarding setting. This moment of sharing will underline the importance of art as a lever for personal and collective development.
Spring 2025 – from March 18, 2025 to May 6, 2025.
Fall 2025 – from October 2 to November 27, 2025.
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This project is carried out in partnership with the CIUSSS – Direction de la protection de la jeunesse CRJDA and the Centre de réadaptation pour jeunes en difficulté d’adaptation, le gouvernail, and thanks to the generous support of the Caisse d’économie solidaire.
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About the artists
Josée Landry Sirois is an artist based in Saint-Michel-De-Bellechasse, who works on a variety of projects involving drawing, installation, collection and scenography. They speak of the larger-than-life, the greater-than-itself. Often sensitized by cultural mediation through her projects, one will always find entrenchments of encounters and feelings on the surface of her works. She has always done this, however, symbolizing the senses. For several years now, she has been accumulating original associations with the human being at the center of her ideations: majestic drawings inspired by children, itinerants, the elderly, work in the fields, phantasmagorical installations, scenographies…
On paper, she explores territories, ecosystems and geographies in series of drawings with increasingly obsessive strokes, which become symbols of life. Echoing these random tracings, her work, composed of snippets of everyday life, constructs a discourse on the fragility of things, nature and the persistence of existence. From the intimate to the universal, and from the invisible to the macroscopic, Josée’s works live on strangely familiar paradoxes, echoing fantastical and collective stories. Her work has been presented at the Musée régional de Rimouski, the Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée de la Civilisation de Québec, Manif d’art 8, l’œil de Poisson…
Her work is part of numerous institutional and private collections, including those of Caisses Desjardins, BMO, Collection prêt d’œuvres d’art du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Musée de la Civilisation de Québec, Collection Méduse and the Québec City collection. She is represented by Galerie Alexandre Motulsky-Falardeau.
Mathieu M. Bouchard is a visual artist based in Quebec City whose practice questions the mechanisms of language and the traces left by information systems. Through the collection and archiving of everyday fragments – grocery lists, screenshots, images from online sales platforms – he reveals the accidental poetry that emerges from communication structures and technological imperfections. His work places tools and media in tension, exploring their role in the formation and transmission of ideas.
Sensitive to the collective dimension of art, he favors dialogue and the sharing of knowledge. His approach, tinged with play and experimentation, aims to activate critical reflection on our interactions with digital and material environments.
He also works as part of the COLLECTION collective with Vincent Drouin . Together, they have produced several public art projects. Alongside his artistic practice, he teaches visual arts at Cégep Limoilou. This fall, he begins a master’s degree in visual and media arts at UQAM.
Sculptor Mathieu Fecteau was born in the late 80s in Saint-Léonard-de-Portneuf, a rural village near Quebec City, and still works there in his picturesque rural studio. Marked by the company of cows and by the agricultural context, his approach to sculpture is based on encounters and happy bricolage. His works are unusual, to say the least: giant popcorn machine, hair toque, mechanical beaver or knitting tricycle. He considers himself to be a “patenteux”, happily frolicking between craft, engineering, performance, product design, clown animation, art brut, cultural mediation and popular celebrations. His sometimes participatory, sometimes contemplative pieces have been presented in outdoor public art trails, festivals and cultural mediation projects in Quebec and Europe.
A multidisciplinary artist born in Toronto, Noelle Wharton-Ayer has lived and worked in Quebec City since 2011. Her practice considers the ways in which the image of the botanical can challenge us to introspection and act as an entry point into the construction of personal and familial narratives. She is interested in the collage process as a methodology that engages both real and imagined spaces, the mundane and the spectacular. The artist holds a BFA from York University and an MFA from Université Laval. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and Europe. Since 2019 she has been working as a freelance artist-mediator for cultural mediation projects in Quebec City. In winter 2024 the artist was awarded a CALQ creation grant for her Bedfellowsproject , which was presented in an exhibition at the VU Photo artist center in May 2024.