When art is more than a major

The artist, teacher and grandmother just completed a one-week stay at Centre SAGAMIE in Alma, Quebec — her first artist residency.

Centre SAGAMIE provides technical support to contemporary artists working with photos and infographic art through an all-inclusive artist residency program. The centre hosts more than 50 Canadian and international artists a year.

“I felt like a princess. They were so good at responding to what I wanted to do,” says Préfontaine. She is interested in emotional memory and collective hope and confusion in a world full of war and new technologies.

She altered and paired photos of newborn twins pulled from newspapers and the internet for her project “to put them in conversation,” she says.

“I wanted to convey there was a clash in me,” Préfontaine explains. “Yes, it’s wonderful to have babies, but how can we be so light about having children today?”

Préfontaine has exhibited across Canada over the past 20 years, but she wasn’t always a practicing artist.

With a degree in French writing, Préfontaine worked for her family’s publishing company during her twenties.

“I dreamed of going to Concordia to make art but the only time I could was when the company was sold,” she recounts.

Eager to compile a portfolio, Préfontaine took community classes, then went to the Saidye Bronfman Centre (now the Segal Centre) — and she never stopped.

A single mother with two children at home, Préfontaine enrolled at Concordia at age 33 to pursue a major in painting and drawing with a minor in photography.

“It was very hard at first,” she admits. On top of learning to draw bubbles and running shoes, the francophone Montrealer taught herself English by carrying a dictionary around.

“We had demanding teachers, which was a really good thing,” she recalls. “I was very grateful to be there.”

Préfontaine continued her studies at Université du Québec à Montréal, earning an MA in visual and media arts in 2003 and a BA in teaching in 2006 — taking night classes while teaching at cultural centers by day.

She has shown her work at six solo exhibitions and seven group exhibitions since 1994.

Now as ever, art is essential to her everyday practice: “I need to do it.”