director
Laura De Decker and Herménégilde Chiasson, the fifth artist pair of Connexion Exchange, are currently working together on a mentorship and collaboration.
Connexion Exchange is a 3-month mentorship program pairing nine emerging and mid-career New Brunswick artists with established Canadian art mentors for one-on-one mentorship. This program began in June 2021 and will continue into this summer. Mentorships will be completed online or in person, if possible. This program will culminate in a joint artist talk and the creation of an artwork. Over the course of each mentorship, updates of the pairs’ work will be shared. The gallery exhibition will take place after all the mentorships have been completed in the Fall of 2022.
Laura De Decker is a graduate of the Art and Art History program between the University of Toronto and Sheridan College and MFA program in Visual Arts, University of Victoria where she started to write computer programs to have control over the colours in her artworks. She is a former member of the Red Head Gallery. She was a panelist at Banff New Media Institute, at ISEA2014 in Dubai, and at OCADU. She was artist-in-residence for CAFKA (Contemporary Art Forum for Kitchener + Area)/Christie Digital and for Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo. She has been the recipient of numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants. She published an article in the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts called Quantum Catwalk about her 50-foot by 7-foot laser-cut vinyl installation at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. She lives in Moncton, NB.
Herménégilde Chiasson was born in Saint-Simon, New Brunswick (1946). He holds a BA from the Université de Moncton (1967), a BFA from Mount Allison University (1972), a Master’s degree in aesthetics from the Université de Paris 1 (1976), an MFA from the State University of New York (1981) and a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris (1983). He served as the 29th Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick from 2003 to 2009.
Chiasson has participated in diverse areas of art, literature and culture throughout his career. He was the director of the Galerie d’art de l’Université de Moncton (1974), founding president of the publishing house Éditions Perce-Neige (1984), president of the Galerie Sans Nom (1980), founding member of the Aberdeen cooperative (1965) and of Imago (1987), founding president of Productions du Phare-Est (1998), invited curator for the exhibition Anecdotes and Enigmas: The Marion McCain Atlantic Art Exhibition, at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (1994), and president of the Association acadienne des artistes professionnel(le)s du Nouveau- Brunswick (1993-1995).
He has participated in more than 100 exhibitions, produced over a dozen films, authored several books, and has been published in prominent literary magazines. He received the Prix France-Acadie (1986 and1992), the rank of Chevalier de l’Ordre français des Arts et des Lettres (1990), l’Ordre des francophones d’Amérique (1993), le Grand Prix de la francophonie canadienne (1999), an honourary Doctor of Letters from the Université de Moncton (1999), the prestigious Prix quinquennal Antonine-Maillet-Acadie Vie (2003) and le Prix Montfort (2004).
Stay tuned for dates of the mentorships, talks and other special events at connexionarc.org.