Above all a painter, Isabelle Guimond uses photography as a starting point and a source of inspiration for recording scenes from her everyday life and environment. As she has written, “My work consists of a constant back-and-forth between the street and the studio, between capturing an image through photography and then removing it through the act of painting, between the need to describe the world I live in and the contingencies inherent to working with whatever medium I am using.” She is an artist who shines a spotlight on familiar popular culture by bringing us face to face with the reality of the Montréal neighbourhood in which she lives, Hochelaga—a disadvantaged, sometimes violent area, where there nonetheless still remains a chance to dream and a feeling that something unexpected could happen at any moment. With her garish colours, Isabelle Guimond shifts between a hard look at our way of life and an intimate narrative that is close to fictionalized autobiography.