Board of Directors
Lou-Anne Bourdeau, President
Settled in Manitoba for a few years, Lou-Anne Bourdeau is involved in the programming of the Maison des artistes visuels francophones (House of Francophone Visual Artists) of Saint-Boniface in Manitoba. She also coordinated the first edition of the Contextualizations project of Réseau N.O. Recipient of a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Lou-Anne is a master’s candidate in art history at Laval University. She is interested, among other things, in the development of modern and contemporary artistic movements in Quebec and Canada, more particularly in abstract art. She is the recipient of the Michelle-de-la-Pradelle prize for an essay on the work of the painter Fernand Leduc published in the Proceedings of the 17th Artefact conference.
Tam-Ca Vo-Van, administrator
Tam-Can Vo-Van studied music at the Université de Moncton and ethnomusicology at the Université de Montréal. She worked in communications and programming for the Festival international du cinema francophone en Acadie from 1996 to 2000, and was a founding member of the collective Code Régional. She is currently the director of Galerie SAW Gallery in Ottawa, and has been a board member of AGAVF since 2005, serving as president from 2007 to 2014.
Nisk Imbeault, administrator
Nisk Imbeault has been the director-curator of the Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen at the Université de Moncton since 2010. She graduated from the Université de Moncton in 1996 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts before continuing her studies in history, philosophy, and art in Montréal. While in university, she worked at Imago printmaking studio, and for several years at the Festival international du cinema francophone en Acadie as a marketing and communications officer, activities coordinator, and assistant director of programming. She was also the director of Galerie Sans Nom from 2001 to 2011. Imbeault devotes much of her time to various boards and committees that support the visual arts.
Emilie Grace Lavoie, administrator
Emilie Grace Lavoie is an artist, curator and member of the 3E collective, originally from Edmundston (unceded traditional Wolastoqiyik territory), New Brunswick. Lavoie holds a college diploma in fashion design (2011) from LaSalle College in Montreal, a bachelor’s degree in visual arts (2016) from the Université de Moncton and a master’s degree in fine arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver (2018). In 2017, Lavoie received the silver medal at the VIII Games of La Francophonie in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) in the Sculpture and Installation category, representing Canada-New Brunswick. Lavoie’s work has been presented in various exhibitions including in British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, New Brunswick and will soon be showing in solo and group exhibitions throughout the province of New Brunswick, among others at the Galerie d’ art Beaverbrook, the New Brunswick Museum, the Center des Arts et de la Culture de Dieppe, Galerie Colline and Jones Gallery. Emilie currently sits on the board of directors of Galerie Sans Nom, Moncton.
Laura Demers, administrator
Laura Demers is an emerging artist and independent curator working in Toronto. She holds a BAV in painting and drawing from the University of Ottawa (2015) and an MA in art history and theory from the University of Toronto (2017). Her artistic practice centres on silkscreen prints and cyanotypes, drawings, installations and, sometimes, perfumes. Her work interests include scientific/pseudoscientific discourse, meteorology, botany, technology, architecture and landscaping; in short, to the materiality of the environment and the human impact on nature. Her works have been exhibited in Ontario and Quebec; she has also published in journals such as C Magazine, Blank Check Press, Prefix Photo, Public Parking, and many others. Since 2019 she has ventured into curating and organized, among other exhibitions, Greenhouse Effects (Art Spin Hamilton, 2019), Cut from the Same Cloth (The Power Plant, 2020), You Just Hold your Breath (the plumb, 2021), and Against the Winds and Tides (La Galerie du Nouvel- Ontario, 2022). Laura Demers is co-founder of the self-managed gallery the plumb (theplumb.ca) and currently the Communications Coordinator at Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario, Sudbury.
Christine Comeau, conseillère
Christine Comeau (she/her) lives and works in Moncton, NB where she has been the Executive Director of Atelier d’estampe Imago since 2019 and co-owner of an art materials store, the Art Shack since 2014. Comeau is a graduate of the Université de Moncton, where she completed a multidisciplinary bachelor’s degree with concentrations in visual arts and administration in 2012. She is a part-time artist and works primarily in silkscreening and photography.
Illustration: Christine Comeau
AGAVF direction
Elise Anne LaPlante, Co-director
Elise Anne LaPlante (she/her) is an independent curator, writer, and cultural worker. She flourishes in the grey areas, intrigued and driven by the political possibilities of the poetic. She explores affect and imaginaries while remaining acutely attentive to the dehierarchization of knowledge.
Some of her recent exhibitions as a curator include the three-cycle project Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre in partnership with La Maison des artistes visuels francophones (St. Boniface, MB, 2022), the Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen (Moncton, NB, 2023) and the Galerie de l’UQAM (Montreal, QC, 2023-2024), Le murmure d’une empreinte (Arprim, Montréal, 2022, with Caroline Mauxion and Céline Huyghebaert), Images rémanentes (a public art itinerary in the city of Moncton), Tombées dans les interstices : A Contemporary Look at the Contribution of a Few Women Artists to Modern-day Acadie (Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen, 2017; Galerie Colline, 2018) and Dérouler l’archive : LASART (1982) revisité (Galerie Sans Nom, 2015; Langage Plus, 2017). Her words have appeared in various publications and gallery texts, and in the magazines esse arts + opinions, Espace art actuel, and Vie des arts.
As a cultural worker, she has been involved in various projects since 2014, providing artistic and administrative coordination, mentoring as well as editorial work. In particular, she has worked closely with the Musée d’art de Joliette, Galerie de l’UQAM, Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen, AAAPNB, Galerie Sans Nom and Festival RE:FLUX.
Véronique Leblanc, Co-director
Véronique Leblanc (she/her) is an independent curator, art writer, teacher and cultural worker. Her research focuses on the imaginary of the common in contemporary art through a range of artistic practices that combine collaborative and performative approaches with documentary strategies.
Recent exhibitions include: Anne-Marie Ouellet – Cohésion. Une enquête sur le faire groupe (Musée d’art de Joliette, 2023), Franchissements (Galerie UQO, Gatineau, 2021-2022), Les histoires nécessaires | Instrumental Stories (Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen and Musée acadien de l’Université de Moncton, 2019), Chto Delat? Performative Practices of Our Time (Vox, 2018), Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens. Putting Life to Work (Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, Montreal, 2016), Polyphonies (Optica, Montreal, 2015) and faire avec (AdMare, Îles-de-la-Madeleine, 2013).
A lecturer in art history at UQAM and involved in the artist-run centers milieu for over ten years, she sees the exhibition projects, pedagogical adventures and administrative practices in which she engages as shared learning opportunities. As mentor for the first four editions of AGAVF’s Curatorial incubator (2019-2022), she accompanied a dozen emerging curators from the francophone communities across the country in the development of exhibition projects, in addition to getting to learn more about member’s realities.
Before teaming up as AGAVF codirectors, Elise Anne LaPlante and Véronique Leblanc also worked closely together as curators of the 7th edition of the ORANGE triennial, entitled Cultivating Humility | M8jagen piwihozw8gan (Saint-Hyacinthe, 2022).