Souhaits & Désirs (Wishes & Desires), 2025

Annie Baillargeon  

Annie Baillargeon lives and works in Quebec City. Her multidisciplinary approach integrates painting, performance and photography to propose an exhilarating and transgressive representation of the body. She co-founded Les Fermières Obsédées, an art collective known for their irreverent action art. She now pursue her practice as a founding member of the collective B.L.U.S.H.

Many Art Centers in Quebec and Canada has presented her solo work: Center PHI, L'Oeil de poisson and the Centre VU of Quebec City, Espace F in Matane, Gallery Séquence in Saguenay, and the Gallery 44 in Toronto. She was also part of numerous collective exhibitions, most notably: Orange Expression center,Appearances at the Musée d'art contemporain of Montréal, C'est arrivé près de chez vous at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, In a Post-World : Post-punk Art Now presented at The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, The Constructed Images at the Contact Image Festival in Toronto and Touched at the Liverpool Biennal. She also presented her work in France, Serbia, Poland, Ecuador, Ireland, Australia, Wales, and at Chicago.

Annie Baillargeon's work frames states of transition and decline through feminist concerns. Her multidisciplinary approach, rooted in performance, relies on self-representational strategies to show a performative body in interaction with its surroundings. Baillargeon's images, videos, and performances incorporate an autofictional language into visual and material environments to create an ever-morphing whole. Working across different media and the multiple human, feminine, and maternal antagonisms which constitute her reality, she composes autofictional scenes that bolster and reinvent her relationship to the world in the hope of finding balance.

Without confining herself to the gender binary, Baillargeon fragments, multiplies, and scatters her image by staging personas in environments evoking political, psychological, and ecological concerns. Symptoms of a dysphoric world, figures of the oppression which creeps into our private and public lives, these personas find themselves forced to act sometimes with and at other times against their environments. Each work appears like a scene told from an intimate perspective in which the artist narrates this feeling of entanglement and the need to learn how to breathe again in light of what is happening. In her abundant style, gestures, accessories, and costumes recast the feminine body, enabling the artist to disrupt the gazes and expectations in order to reshape them. Dressing up, moving, and exposing oneself become political conduits to invent one's freedom.

There are more than 20 publications dedicated to her work. She also received many prizes: Salt Spring Art Prize in 2015; Vidéré Prize, best event ; Quebec Arts Council; the Manif d'Art ; Cornelius-Krieghoff Prize, Quebec City; Vidéaste Recherché-e Prize; Jury Prize, La Bande Vidéo, Quebec City. She also has been nominated on the Long List for the Quebec of the Sobey Prize Award in 2017. Her work is featured in several collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Art Bank of the Canada Council for the Arts.