Entre tes mains (In Your Hands)

--->Public Presentations at OPTICA
Saturday, September, 12 2026
3pm to 4pm
Claudia Goulet-Blais’s sensitive and evocative project, Entre tes mains (In Your Hands), offers an immersive and performative approach to photography and its installation, presented across media including ceramics and textiles. Her work takes place in the sphere of familial intimacy, reflecting on often invisible sites of care and relationality that are foundational to lived lives: lives of wonder, compassion, and world-making. These relationships most often begin in the hands of the mother. Where present, maternal care offers a first orientation to the world, the first place in which we come to know ourselves, or indeed, that we come to be a self at all. As philosopher Sara Ahmed notes, this orientation is the origin of our selfhood, “To be orientated is … to be turned toward certain objects, those that help us find our way … Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘what‘ we direct our energy and attention toward.”1

Fleurs coupées

--->Public Presentations at OPTICA
Saturday, September, 12 2026
4pm to 5pm
Fleurs coupées [Cut Flowers] is a collaborative process engaged by Sara A.Tremblay and Anne-Marie Proulx in which the trajectories of their distinct approaches to the medium of photography come together in an assemblage of their living environments. With their long-standing respective practices of rigorous attention to imaging processes and to the pictorial rendition of natural forms, the artists explore how landscape imagery becomes a carrier of memory, relation, and encounter. The shared experiences underlying their lived contingencies become intertwined with the temporality of photography as a practice of being-with. In so doing, they break through the limits of photographic indexicality toward a photographic relationality, constructing a triangulated encounter in which their positioning in relation to the lens, the frame, and the medium activates questions of intersubjective relations.

Head of Communications, Outreach Development, and Archives

Deadline for applications: September 28, 2026, 11:59 p.m.

Start of employment: October 13, 2026

Welcome to Éléonore Servantie

Passionate about the arts in all their forms and their transformative power, Éléonore Servantie is dedicated to leading socially impactful artistic projects. After earning a Master’s degree in Cultural Policy from Sciences Po Aix in France, her journey has taken her across diverse artistic fields, working with a wide range of audiences: at the Louvre Museum with community groups and youth in social integration programs; in music with individuals experiencing socio-economic precarity; and in contemporary dance with school audiences of all ages. Today, she brings her core values of inclusion, knowledge sharing, and co-creation to the heart of OPTICA’s educational program, harnessing art as a catalyst for collective empowerment.

The Regroupement Pied Carré invites you to celebrate the cultural season at this not-to-be-missed event bringing together the art centres of Pôle de Gaspé: Atelier Circulaire, Centre CLARK, daphne, Dazibao, Diagonale, ELEKTRA, Occurrence, OPTICA, perte de signal, TOPO; the cultural magazines Ciel Variable, ESPACE art actuel, ESSE arts + opinions, art actuel, Le Sabord, Spirale, Tristesse, and Vie des arts; as well as Céline Bureau and the Regroupement des centres d'artistes autogérés du Québec (RCAAQ).

Aïda Vosoughi, laureate of the 2026 Intersections residency The Conseil des arts de Montréal, OPTICA, centre d’art contemporain and the École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQAM are pleased to announce that Iranian-born Canadian artist Aïda Vosoughi is the laureate of the 2026 Intersections residency.