This March, Jessica Peters will exhibit for the first time in the main room of Galerie Simon Blais. For this occasion, a series of recent paintings will be shown to the public. The artist draws inspiration from the Laurentians, the region of Quebec where she grew up and still resides. Peters features recognizable places in her canvases, but not by relying on realist representations.
With the aid of masking tape, a tool favoured by many contemporary artists, Peters "composes architectural scenery conceived as mosaics ". To do this, she makes original use of multiple techniques at her disposal and creates textures that accentuate the painted material. Despite being the youngest artist represented by Galerie Simon Blais, she has a mature approach to painting, and pursues, as she describes it, the "synthetic phase of Cubism when it seeks to translate the essential traits of the world around it ".
Jessica Petersinvigorates her canvases with the tension exerted by the representation of various dualities, such as interior and exterior, reality and its reflection, the natural world and the built environment, and, more formally, accident and control. In this new series, consisting of a dozen acrylic and aerosol works (sometimes on canvas, sometimes on wood), the evocation of nature by mountains and trees maintains a strong presence, but the painter’s subject remains the act of painting itself.
Born in Saint-Jérôme in 1986, Jessica Peters completed her degree in visual and media arts at UQAM, in 2009. She has participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions at galleries, museums and artist centres in the Laurentians and in Montreal and Toronto. In 2012, she won the young visual artist’s prize at the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides and since that year, she has been represented by Galerie Simon Blais. In 2013, she received a grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for a special collaborative project involving the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides and the Centre d’exposition de Mont-Laurier.
