Prestige Portfolio

Raymonde April was born in 1953 in Moncton, New Brunswick, and grew up in Rivière-du-Loup, in eastern Québec. She lives and works in Montréal, where she has taught photography at Concordia University since 1985. A photographer and artist,she has won acclaim since the late 1970s for her minimalist works inspired by daily life, at the crossroads of documentary, autobiography and narrative. Her work has been widely shown in Canada and abroad, and has also been the subject of major solo exhibitions, including Voyage dans le monde des choses, organized by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 1986; Les fleuves invisibles, produced by the Musée d’art de Joliette in 1997 and which toured in Canada and France until 2000; and Tout embrasser, shown at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery of Concordia University as part of the 2001 edition of Montréal Mois de la photo. Ms. April’s works are found in the major public collections in Canada and in many private collections. In November 2003, she received the Prix Paul-Émile Borduas, the highest distinction in the visual arts awarded by the Government of Québec. She was the 2005 recipient of the Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award for Art Photography. In 2008, she was a finalist for the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Grange Prize and completed an artist’s residency in Beijing, China.

Born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Evergon received a master of arts (fine arts) degree from Rochester Institute of Technology, New York. An instructor and artist-photographer, he lives in Montréal, where he teaches photography at Concordia University. Evergon has had an international career spanning 35 years, dedicated primarily, but not exclusively, to imaging gay male culture. Taking an interest in both historical and contemporary techniques, in his earliest works he explored non-silver processes and electrostatic works. His later work with instant-imaging processes culminated in a series of oversize (1 metre by 2 metre) colour Polaroid prints. During the 1990s, he focused essentially on two bodies of black & white works that made use of press cameras. Ramboys: A Bookless Novel was a fabricated document on gay culture, consisting of large silver gelatin prints, while his Manscapes were ''documented fictionaction'' works, digitally imaged in male-to-male cruising grounds. Evergon’s output in the last five years has included the series Margaret and I, consisting of largerthan- life nudes of his mother, and Chez Moi: Domestic Content, a selection of images from the artist’s personal collection of memorabilia accompanied by self-portraits.

Pascal Grandmaison lives and works in Montréal, where he was born in 1975. His work consists of placing images in specific spatial situations through video projection as well as photography. In his installations, always meticulously timed, he explores the fragile chinks at the frontiers of the perceptible, between sameness and difference. A subtle and never-ending play of mirrors, his works cast a poetic gaze on the way in which time, with its many filters, conditions the perceptual process. They have been the subject of solo shows at the Carleton University Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Galerie René Blouin, Galerie B-312 and Espace Vox (Montréal), Jessica Bradley Art + Projects (Toronto), Galerie Séquence (Chicoutimi), the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), as well as at Galerie Georges Verney-Carron and Galerie BF 15 (Lyon, France). Mr. Grandmaison has also taken part in several group exhibitions, including in France, at the Galeries de l’ancien collège des Jésuites (Reims), the Centre culturel canadien (Paris) and the Centre d’art contemporain (Meymac); at Existentie (Ghent, Belgium), the Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain (Luxembourg), the International Biennale of Contemporary Art 2005 in Prague (Czech Republic) and the Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, Poland); and at the Jack Shainman Gallery (New York). Venues for Canadian group shows have included the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery of Concordia University (Montréal), the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Québec City), 106 Sparks Street (Ottawa), the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto) and the Edmonton Art Gallery (touring exhibition). Since 2000, Mr. Grandmaison’s video works have been shown at numerous festivals and biennales in Italy, Switzerland, England, Germany, Portugal, the United States and Canada. Pascal Grandmaison is represented by Galerie René Blouin in Montréal.

A native of New Hartford, Connecticut, John Hall joined Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal in 2003 after dancing with the Miami City Ballet for five years. He was promoted to soloist for the 2009 season and divides his time between dance and photography. ''My camera helps me understand movement, and movement is a source of inspiration for my photos,'' he explains. Between 1997 and 2003, Mr. Hall took photographs for Miami Contemporary Dance, the Balletto dell’esperia, and the Miami City Ballet (as its official photographer). Since settling in Montréal in 2003, he has been a photographer for the professional program of Ballet Divertimento, Didy Veldman, Coleman Lemieux et Compagnie, Rumpus Room Dance, the Festival de Saint-Sauveur, as well as Les Grands Ballets, for which he has done both performance and rehearsal photography. ''My relationship with photography began more than 10 years ago while I was dancing in Miami. A gift from my grandfather, my first camera changed the way I perceived the world. Almost immediately, I started taking pictures in the theatre and I discovered that the stage looked more real to me through the camera than with the naked eye. Also, I quickly learned how seeing with the camera and creating successful photographs are two different things. Only after my technique matured and I learned to articulate the emotional content of my images would I find success as a photographer. I believe the power of a photograph lies not in its verisimilitude, but in the way it can selectively hide or reveal the true nature of its subject. Like a dancer, the photographer uses his technique to manipulate the appearance of time and space, each image becoming a fusion of instinct, training, and performance. My photographs of dance give the audience a glimpse of the world lying beyond the literal truth of what they see on stage and like a performance, each image is its own work of art. Your impression of the images I capture will be unique and through these prints, you can experience something of how I see the world.''

Born in León, Spain, Jesús Vallinas studied fine arts before discovering the world of dance in 1980, via Maurice Béjart’s Ballet du XXe siècle. Fascinated by bodies in motion and their immense expressive potential, in 1981 he won admittance to the school of the Ballet clásico nacional in Madrid, directed by Carmen Roche, where he first studied under Carmina Ocaña. A year later, he was hired to dance in the corps de ballet of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. Throughout his career, he has found time to work as a photographer and graphic designer as well as a dancer. He co-founded the monthly magazine Por la danza with its director Henri Brown, and was responsible for its logo, photography content, graphic design and illustrations. Working as a visual consultant, Mr. Vallinas created the corporate brand and logo for the Carmen Roche International Dance Center and was its official photographer (1987–89). He has also worked as a freelancer for several ad agencies, including KMO, Tactics, Equip, Presto and Galería FM, and as a photographer, illustrator and creative director for Santa Lucia, Iberrail, TNT, Grupo 4 Securitas, Cajas de Ahorros Confederadas and Dister Distribución Cinematográfica. Since 1990, Mr. Vallinas has been the permanent photographer for the Compañia Teatro de la Danza in Madrid, also designing posters and illustrations for several performances. In 1999, he was hired by the director and actor Josep Maria Flotats to create visual designs for Yasmina Reza’s Arte (“Art”), which holds the record for the most awards and highest attendance of any play in Spain’s history. As a dance photographer, he has captured the work of such noted personalities as Ana Laguna, Alicia Alonso, Fernando Bujones, Carlos Acosta, Maya Plitsetskaya, Nacho Duato and Víctor Ullate, to name only a few. He has also worked for companies such as Ballet Nacional de España, CND 1 and 2, Nuevo Ballet Español, Ballet Victor Ullate, Ballet Zaragoza, Compañía de Rafaela Carrasco, Cruceta Ballet Flamenco, Ballet de Nice, Lindsay Kemp Company, Nuremberg Ballet and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal. Jesús Vallinas’s photos have been featured in several dance publications, such as Por La Danza, Ballet 2000 and Dance Magazine, as well as in many daily newspapers in Spain. He has managed the webzine Foto Escana, dedicated to performing-arts photography.