Exhibition

Trained at the Alchimia school in Florence, Italy, Silvie Altschuler has fun. She takes a whimsical, playful and ironic look at the world. Mainly figurative, her jewellery is designed in gold with touches of plastic or polymers taken from children’s toys, thus questioning the value usually attributed to precious materials through humour.

Marie-Eve G. Castonguay holds a diploma from the École de joaillerie de Québec and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. With her compositions of orderly, deliberate balance and calculated textures and motifs, her jewellery, crafted in silver and wood, is an invitation to tranquillity and meditation.

A graduate of the École de joaillerie de Montréal in 2010, Gabrielle Desmarais took part in Labo, Noel Guyomarc’h’s research workshop in Montreal in 2011, before continuing her training at the Alchimia school in Florence, Italy, and exploring the many potentialities of textiles at Concordia University in Montreal (2017). Her work is distinguished by the singular attention she pays to working with materials – mainly oxidized silver – which she pushes to their limits in order to extract their full expressivity. Each piece of jewellery is imbued with the artist’s gestures. This latest body of work, entitled “jardin”, is at once dramatic, imposing and delicate.

Aurélie Guillaume first studied jewellery at the École de joaillerie de Montréal (2012) and then at NSCAD University in Halifax (2015). Her work celebrates the history of enamel and its long narrative tradition by transposing it into a contemporary context influenced by street art, comics, pop art and counterculture. Drawing on daily motifs, Aurélie highlights the poetry of simple moments, praising gentleness and slowness. Through the process of enamelling, her illustrations transcend the two-dimensional realm of paper and find a new life in the physical world as wearable objects.

A graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Emily Lewis’ artistic approach is rooted in a reappropriation of the history of early jewellery and craft design. In particular, she draws inspiration from the cast steel jewellery of Berlin that was popular in the mid-19th century, and the wallpaper designs of William Morris. By isolating ornaments on paper, which she multiplies over and over again before cutting them out, Lewis transforms the resulting pattern by applying thin layers of copper using the electroforming technique. Superimposing the elements she fixes with stitches mixed with Swarovski crystals, Lewis’s approach walks a fine line between reality and imagination, between art and function.

In 1998, Kathy Ouellette obtained a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Université Laval, followed in 2001 by a diploma from the Maison des métiers d’art du Québec, specialising in ceramics. A ceramist rather than a jeweller, Kathy Ouellette revisits the function of the American knuckle. Using motifs, scrolls and the material – porcelain – she deconstructs the expectations associated with the weapon represented by the knuckle. Sculpted with care and delicacy directly from the mass, these new knuckles of imposing proportions are enriched with new meaning.