St-Jean, Quebec
St-Jean, Quebec is based on a large panoramic photograph from 1915, reprinted using lithography and screenprint. The photograph depicts a “Troupe Expéditionnaire,” a battalion of 750 French Canadian soldiers preparing to leave Quebec for England and, ultimately, France. At that moment, these men represented a community with little political or cultural influence beyond Quebec.
The making of St-Jean, Quebec furthered my research in two directions: first, by exploring the possibilities of printmaking as a means of visual communication; and second, by examining my own French Canadian heritage and its recent history.
The photograph, discovered in the archives of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, became a point of entry into the lives of the French Canadian men who were trained and sent to Europe to fight in the First World War. Two of my uncles, Octave and Alexandre, are somewhere within the group. Searching for them in the photograph led me to consider their lives, their identity, and what it meant to be French Canadian at that particular moment in history. I could not help but compare their historical reality with the increasing political and cultural tensions of my own time.