Rosalie Favell
at Petite-Vallée

EXHIBIT

Wish You Were Here

Théâtre de la Vieille Forge | 4 Rue de la Longue-Pointe | Petite-Vallée

Rosalie Favell, Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Ottawa, Ontario | rosaliefavell.com

Rosalie Favell is a photo-based artist born in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Drawing inspiration from her family history and Métis (Cree/English) heritage, she uses a variety of sources, from family albums to popular culture, to present a complex self-portrait of her experiences as a contemporary aboriginal woman. Her work has appeared in exhibitions in Canada and the U.S., and in Edinburgh, Paris and Taipei. Numerous institutions have acquired her artwork, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (both in Ottawa), the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, D.C.) and the Rockwell Museum of Western Art (Corning, New York). She has received numerous grants, and won prestigious awards such as the Chalmers Fellowship, the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunten Award and the Karsh Award. A graduate of Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, Rosalie Favell holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Mexico. She has studied and taught extensively at the postgraduate level and has worked with grassroots organizations in Winnipeg, with Inuit educational groups in Ottawa and with Nepalese women’s groups in Katmandu.

EXHIBIT AT RENCONTRES

Wish You Were Here

With the series Wish You Were Here, Rosalie Favell re-creates a connection with her grandmother by way of family photo archives that she’s collected. Surrounded by this abundance of personal images, she mobilizes both her childhood memories and a new conversation with memory. The link to her ancestors along with the practice of self-portraits she pursues in her work are present in order to revisit the issue of identity and of the portrait, particularly of the aboriginal woman. Bearers of memory, these photos provide a stage for the travel mementos of the artist’s grandmother by combining them with current shots of the places visited. Thanks to that superimposition of images, the impossible encounter of different eras is made possible after all. The artist creates a sensitive and universal portrait as an homage to family bonds and to the presence of the human beings that surround us.