La Famille Plouffe
ARTIST STATEMENT
Wherever La Famille Plouffe engages in an artistic endeavour as an artist-family, it takes it upon itself to put to the test a contextual anchor through its creations. With them, it always wants to sublimate the banal or trivialize the fantastic, brighten up the tragic or dramatize the playful as much as to archaize the contemporary or update the tradition.—The aim of its current praxis is to share the peculiar history of the places where it invests itself and the precariousness of their social imaginary. It also reflects on the stakes of a folkorization of popular culture in its intergenerational transmission. All facets of La Famille Plouffe’s work are more or less linked to elements of an essentially language-based culture (stories, colloquial expressions, gestures, objects or vernacular know-how). Thus, it renews and highlights in its own way the transmission of a tangible and intangible cultural heritage, which is not yet considered as such.—It was through memorable creative experiences with its grandparents that La Famille Plouffe felt the eagerness to promote transgenerational exchanges. It then decided to implement its own creative process of story-mending (ravaudage d’histoires), by blending the figure of the storyteller with the prestidigitator. In a desire for re-enchantment, it revives cultural referents through unpretentious tricks. Through the prism of children’s play, its propositions tinged with the domestic, the common and the run-of-the-mill are allowed to be elevated to legendary stature.—La Famille Plouffe’s projects usually materialize in the shape of vernaculariums. These are a multisensory human scale assemblage, with a variety of artistic techniques adapted to the context. In other words, it is a crossover between an expended diorama and a make-believe historical reconstruction, both entangled in familiar visual and formal referents. This way, the family’s proposals remain malleable because they essentially depend on the site-specific encounters it makes and on its experience of the location, which are generally linked to micro-communities.
La Famille Plouffe has worked together since the arrival of each one in the life of the other. After a family stay at the Maisons Daura, international artists’ residencies in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie in France, it decided to put forward this shared signature for the sake of upholding the integrity of the unit as a whole. Since then, La Famille Plouffe took part in the 35th International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-Saint-Paul, the Triennale Banlieue! at the Maison des Arts de Laval, the Musée à ciel ouvert of Saint-Lambert and the National Biennial of Contemporary Sculpture at the Musée POP in Trois-Rivières, among others. La Famille Plouffe also presented solo exhibitions with Action Art Actuel in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer and Langage Plus in Alma. Additionally, it is getting ready for the residency-event SEULS et ENSEMBLE which will be held next year in Magdalen Islands with Ad Mare. In a short period of time, it has had the great privilege of being invited to several public art competitions for cities or for buildings through the provincial government policy. It maintains its momentum by creating public artworks following invitations, open calls or personal initiatives (permanent or temporary artworks)—The philosophical stance of La Famille Plouffe is that everything that has been previously created under the name of Guillaume Boudrias-Plouffe was in fact fundamentally created by La Famille Plouffe. Likewise, Guillaume has represented the family in the past for projects in Quebec and the rest of Canada, France, Côte d’Ivoire and Italy. The same applies to all prizes and grants received at the time in his own name, for instance: the Prix relève from Culture Montérégie, the Joseph-S.-Stauffer prize from the Canada Council for the Arts, as much as grants from the Conseil des arts de Longueuil, the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. It is also Guillaume from La Famille Plouffe who is on the board of directors of the RCAAQ (association of artist-run centres of Québec) and 3e impérial, centre d'essai en art actuel.