Zacharie Gauvreau is an interdisciplinary artist based in Montreal. He studied visual arts in Montreal and Gatineau and has training in 3D modeling. His work has been exhibited in artist-run centers and festivals across Quebec, including Artch (2023), Art Souterrain (2021), and AXENÉO7 (2019). He is the recipient of the McAbbie Foundation’s Excellence Grant. (2023) Alongside his artistic practice, he works as a museum technician, which gives him a unique perspective on the art world. Laced with references to the history of contemporary art, the world of entertainment, and the realm of digital technologies, Zacharie Gauvreau’s works unfold as an attempt to reconcile artistic expression with technological advancements. Drawing inspiration from appropriationist practices in contemporary art, he plays with the aesthetic and symbolic codes intrinsic to this milieu. He appropriates them, subverts them, and attempts to breathe new meaning into them without their knowledge.
Fascinated by the customs and aesthetic codes specific to contemporary subcultures - from the art world to online forums - his work draws on a combination of personal ethnography and new media. He appropriates these codes in an ironic and cynical manner for critical purposes, as part of an ongoing exploration aimed at revealing the visual and social mechanisms inherent in our daily lives, both tangible and virtual. More recently, Zacharie Gauvreau’s work has explored themes such as autonomy, power relations, and the ethics of AI, as well as the impacts of technology on our daily lives and the changes to the nature of work throughout the 21st century. His current work explores the notion of authenticity and originality in the context of contemporary art, taking into account the revolution in technological automation. Through the use of artificial intelligence algorithms, it is now possible to visually represent the average of a large number of images labeled as “contemporary art.” By training a machine learning model on this data, he extracts the characteristics common to these images and condenses them. In short, Zacharie Gauvreau’s work offers a critical and thoughtful perspective on our current society, highlighting the challenges and opportunities of our ever-changing world.