Valerie LeBlanc

Artist Statement -My Father was a career Sergeant in the Signal Corps of the Canadian Army. As a child I re-located constantly, studying in eleven different schools throughout Canada. As an adult, moving has been a natural course of action to me. My education, both formal and informal has been acquired through the process of adapting to each new environment in which I find myself. What keeps people going during the sometimes rough passage through life is of great interest to me.

The image of the carrot which was hung from a string in front of the eyes of horses to keep them moving comes back to me as a metaphor for the desire to continue. As the millenium rolls to an end, the carrot is as outdated an image as the workhorse, but the equation of 'working toward a better future' persists. In the rapid progression of time and the progress of our species, 'some' have achieved 'much' in the material world while the status quo has changed very little. The carrot still dangles for those who achieve in the new economy and the carrot still dangles for those who look for their next meal. The Perpetual Motion Machine that inventors have searched to create has been constantly dangling there for longer than we care to remember.

Biographical Statement (By Valerie LeBlanc - October, 1996). I began my formal art training at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1971. Finding the weight of conceptual art too heavy a load to bear at the time, I left the school six weeks before the end of my Foundation Year to 'find work'. Performing a variety labour jobs along the way, I moved to Toronto, then to Vancouver, finally settling in the small mill town of Fort St. James, BC.

It was an interest in glass that brought me back to art school after an absence of nine years. After two summer sessions at the Banff Centre in 1979 and 1980, I enrolled full time in the Glass Program at the Alberta College of Art in the fall of 1981. By the time I graduated in 1984, I was working more with the surface of the glass, sandcarving images. I dove into painting and sculpture and then into 'moving pictures'. I completed my Master of Fine Arts in the Time Arts Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993.

After ten years of working as a videographer, I have turned full circle and started to dedicate my creative efforts toward the classical plastic arts again, with a constant string tied to new technologies.

"I no longer try to pin down what I do. I use whatever seems to be the appropriate means of expressing what I want to say."


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