Exhibition runs: Feb 3 - March 18
Opening: Fri Feb 3rd, 7 - 10pm  

Quebec's leading mental health and arts centre, Folie/Culture through artistic creation has been pursuing work of information, reflection, and promotion in mental health, as well as around social questions relating to this sometimes painful reality.  

Their Faire manie workshop series was designed by the artist, Josée Landry Sirois as a way for people suffering from mental health problems to express themselves through creating an immense tapestry of obsessions on paper that took the form of drawing, stamping, photocopying, and other media. The Faire manie workshop allowed Folie/Culture to establish their first partnership with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and to have its inaugural Vancouver showing at Gallery Gachet.

Each participant was tasked with graphically filling the landscape of paper with their obsessions and were challenged to replicate the same patterns over and over defining their own language. This automation and repetition of artistic gesture allowed the emergence of a new expression of imagination, lyrically and visually expressing the idea of mania.
The exhibition Faire manie presents the collectiion of works by Blar, Yacynthe Couture, Caroline Dion, Jean Lapointe, Marie-Dominique Rouleau, Shental and Sylvestre.

Josée Landry-Sirois is an emerging artist from Québec City whose art form of preference is drawing. Influenced both by architecture, urbanism and codified writing, she puts in her works graphic gestures with great energy where structure and deconstruction live together. Her work has been presented in numerous collective and solo exhibitions across Canada.  

Faire Manie creation workshops
The approach of these workshops is unique. Folie/Culture offers to people an experience of creation which is connected to mental health only by its theme. Thus, no social worker is present, no therapeutic analysis has its place, only creation takes place. These workshops are places which allow connection between participants and professional artists. They always take place in locations that stimulate the creation and promote deregulation of social settings. The first workshop was offered at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the second at the Maison des métiers d'art de Québec.

Folie/Culture

Since 1984, Folie/Culture has been pursuing through artistic creation a work of information, reflection, and promotion in mental health, as well as around certain social questions related to this painful reality. Their action is characterized by their desire to promote innovative approaches as much in the mental health field as in that of creation. Their objectives lean toward the realization of contemporary art projects and toward promotion and awareness-building in mental health, most specifically in the encounter between these two aspects of their work. They would like to encourage the work of artists who intervene in the field of social perceptions and to make it known to people who are not necessarily used to familiar with art.

Folie/Culture wants to thank Gallery Gachet, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and Maison des métiers d'arts de Québec.

www. folieculture.org

In the second half of the gallery space, we are showcasing Collective works from the Gallery Gachet stable.

Exhibition runs: Feb 3- March 18
Opening: Fri Feb 3rd, 7 - 10pm

This month's featured artists in our Gachet Gallery are Laurie Marshall, Leef Evans and W.N. (Bill) Pope. All three long-term members have been with Gallery Gachet for around a decade and through this time their art practices have developed and bloomed into senior, acclaimed non-mainstream artists who are recognized and revered for their individual and unparalleled painting styles.

Gallery Gachet is a unique artist-run centre located in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Gachet is a collectively-run exhibition and studio space built to empower participants as artists, administrators and curators.  

The organization's cultural services have grown from the operation of a small, basement studio in downtown Granville South, offering one exhibition a year in 1993, to coordinating approximately 3,000 square feet of public-access arts space with up to 12 exhibitions each year, in addition to residencies, workshops, artist talks, symposia, special projects and other events.   

We strive to provide a focal point for dialogue amongst outsider/dissident artists. Through artistic means, we aim to demystify and challenge issues related to mental health and social marginalization in order to educate the public and promote social and economic justice.