Laurence Gravel
Biography
Laurence Gravel is a visual artist and cultural worker originally from Baie-Saint-Paul, in the Charlevoix region of Québec, Canada. She lives and works in Québec City. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Visual and Media Arts (2018) and a Master’s degree in Visual Arts (2024) from Laval University.
Since 2017, she has presented several solo exhibitions, including Descendre en bas (Critérium, 2025), Le roi est chauve (Espace Quatre Cents, 2024), Les Liaisons dangereuses (À l’est de vos empires, online, 2020), and Versailles-Chantier (Jean-Charles Bonenfant Library, 2019). She has also presented her work in group exhibitions, including Arrière-salles (Le Lieu, 2024), a project by Baron Lanteigne, and Rejouer : la matière en trois temps (l’Œil de poisson, 2023), curated by Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf.
She has created numerous performances, including Souriez, vous êtes filmé.es (Arrière-salles, Le Lieu, 2024), Comme Laurence (Risques Calculés, Le Lieu, 2023), Je n’ai jamais payé pour un fromage (The Listening Biennial, Laval University, 2023), and Que devient la femme de Joe Dassin ? (Cabaret audio, Avatar / Mois Multi, Espace Quatre Cents, 2023). Her performative work has also been presented at LEGS in Québec City, Montréal, and Rimouski. In 2026, she will tour performances in Latin America at La Cápsula in Mexico and GALPON F.A.C.E. in Argentina, and will participate in Live Action in Sweden in September 2026.
Her practice has been supported by several grants, including five project and mentorship grants from Première Ovation, a grant from the Conseil des arts de Montréal as part of ARTCH – Art contemporain émergent, as well as the Fondation René-Richard grant, which allowed her to occupy the laboratories at La Bande Vidéo for two years. In 2021, she was named Emerging Artist in Visual Arts at the Québec City Arts and Culture Excellence Awards.
She is also professionally engaged in the cultural sector. She works as an administrative assistant at Folie/Culture and as an artistic facilitator within the Vincent et moi program at the Quebec University Institute of Mental Health (IUSMQ).
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Laurence Gravel is a multidisciplinary artist. She develops her practice at the intersection of popular culture, historical and contextual references, creating spaces for reflection that are both critical and comedic. Her projects take shape through material and immaterial mediums, oscillating between the manipulation of matter and conceptual approaches. She works across a range of forms including video, installation, photography, performance, action, sculpture, writing, and collecting, which she approaches as sites of experimentation.
Performance occupies a central place in her work, both in action and in the object. She activates objects that carry performative potential, whether through their conceptual charge or through the meticulous attention given to their making. Performance allows her to shift the everyday into meaningful situations and to propose a poetic reading of it, where the banal becomes revealing of human experience and often invisible social dynamics.
Her body, presence, and self-representation are essential tools. She stages herself or embodies other feminine identities to question femininity, its social and symbolic constructions, and its relationship to objects, norms, and the world. This position fosters an exploration of individual and collective emancipation, while blurring the boundaries between seriousness and humor, introspection and play.
She approaches failure, abandonment, and risk as driving forces in her research, points of friction with reality that open onto the value of error. This approach is part of what she calls a “poetics of distance,” where displacement, subtle humor, and the testing of situations shift perspectives, create connections with others, and make it possible to address sensitive realities without confronting them directly.