About
Artist Bio
Artist, writer, curator, and art educator, Victoria LeBlanc lives and works in Montreal, Quebec. She was the Director of Montreal’s Visual Arts Centre and McClure Gallery from 1996 - 2017 and Curator of Westmount’s Municipal Gallery from 1999 - 2022. While at the Visual Arts Centre, she re-established the McClure Gallery as a contemporary art venue and introduced a publication and curatorial programme as well as ARTreach, a community outreach programme. As curator and writer, she has contributed to over 50 catalogues on contemporary Canadian artists. She has taught a wide variety of subjects, from portraiture to abstraction to personal directions in painting and one-on-one independent studies. As a visual artist, she began her exhibition career in Montreal at the John Schweitzer Gallery and in Toronto with the Leo Kamen Gallery in the 80s and has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Ontario and Quebec. Her work can be found in corporate and private collections in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. Her creative practice is inflected by an ekphrastic impulse: a dialogue between drawing/painting and writing. Besides her curatorial and catalogue texts, she is the author of Clay Roots, the Potters’ Club and its legacy at the Visual Arts Centre (2021) as well as two poetry collections, Hold (2019) and River | Riven (2024). Forthcoming, Iterations.
Artistic Process
In my creative practice, I move back and forth between visual art and writing as I seek out the common and uncommon ground between image and word, their mutual provocation and inspiration. The works in my latest exhibition, A path walks quietly on its own, were created over a three-year period in conjunction with the poems for the collection River | Riven. Both were inspired by a path along a river’s edge and explore the path as place and metaphor: a clandestine trail of mud where past and present, memory and imagination overlap. Similarly, Hold, a collection of elegiac poems marking the loss of a mother and a daughter’s grief, is accompanied by a series of portraits tracing the slow ebb of life.
I work in both abstraction and figuration. The work often obscures boundaries between the two; I am attracted by the capacity of either genre to suggest a place of liminality. I work in a variety of media, from graphite and watercolour to acrylic and oil in response to what the work demands. While my work is driven by specific ideas and concepts, it is through the process of translating them into the materiality of paint that a larger meaning is provoked and discovered. It is this process of discovery that most interests me. Art-making represents a journey towards a greater understanding of self and the world.