Written by Jennifer Pazienza and Paul-Édouard Bourque

A View of Vision & Dialogue exhibited at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Photo: Joy Cummings Photo.

Walk us through the experience of the project – what did you explore, how did this project/experience impact your artistic practice/creative process or how you see yourself as an artist?

Within the creative constraints of the Covid pandemic and geographic distance, our homes and studios being in Keswick Ridge and Moncton, we clocked hundreds of Zoom call hours. Our discussions became the exhibition Vision & Dialogue, the culmination of a project supported by artsnb, at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in October 2023: a site-specific artistic ecosystem dedicated to an exchange of ideas about the place of representational art that bridged the divide between human and other-than human relationships.

Another view of Vision & Dialogue exhibited at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Photo: Joy Cummings Photo.

A few minutes before the opening reception of Vision & Dialogue exhibited at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Photo: Courtesy of the artists.

Opening reception of Vision & Dialogue at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Photo: Courtesy of the artists.

From our earliest conversations, we experienced an immediate sense of curiosity and discovery that informed our forays into what would warrant similarities and opposites between our works. While maintaining a way for imagination and freedom to reign within two artistic stances each equipped for independence yet aiming at integration, and to understand how our instincts might guide the plan of the project: relationships and connections had to be established, ideas had to fuse and materialize for the exhibition to make visual sense, and places of visual tension and release needed to be identified.

One of the greatest impacts of this project for us, has been experiencing the idea of interdependence. As we worked through the project, we felt the shift from seeing ourselves as individuals and our work as having a distinct voice, to becoming artists in conversation with each other, and working together to ultimately create artworks that would foster a dynamic viewer experience; one that encourages the interplay between our combined and individual voices, as well as that of the viewers.

Please describe a current project/piece that you are working on – what excites you about it?

Reflecting on Vision & Dialogue, we agreed that we only scratched the surface of understanding how practices as divergent as ours can redraw the boundaries of what artists inhabiting a space together can achieve. So, we kept talking!

Since then, whenever we needed to take a breath, a new version emerged: Marking Time for Gallery 78, then Vision & Dialogue 2.0 for Galerie 12 and now, Conversatia for Water Street Gallery at Sunbury Shores Art & Nature Center (SSANC) which is currently on view until June 7, 2025. What excites us with this project is that, rather than travel an exhibition, we are traveling an idea.

A view of the exhibit Marking Time at Gallery 78. Photo: Courtesy of the artists.

For each exhibition we curated our individual and combined works to best align with the poetics of each venue. For us, active and associative spaces shape the dialogue between and among our works and provide viewers with points of entry for joining in the conversation. This is what we intended for Water Street Gallery at SSANC. In this collaboration, how nature inhabits us and how we inhabit it guided the tone and tenor of this show where individual and co-created artistic identity, memory, and the fluidity of time formed the subtext.

Jennifer Pazienza and Paul-Édouard Bourque in St. Andrews, in front of Sunbury Shores Arts & Nature Centre. Photo: Courtesy of the artists.

What themes and techniques are you exploring in your work? What do they mean to you?

Thematically, we share a need for making and understanding human, environmental, and spiritual connections. Paul meticulously manipulates self-portraits and Jenn, from the sanctuary of her Keswick Ridge studio, seeks communion with what is beyond the corporeal self.

In portraiture as in life, Paul believes the human gaze is a way of assessing and relating to the built environment. He uses an optical encoded dot matrix system that directs the gaze beyond the viewer. Jenn’s omission of visual references to the built environment paradoxically makes it present in the viewer’s imagination.

These are our ways of creating contemplative spaces for questioning where we, as a species, stand in relationship to each other and the world that surrounds us.

Another view of Vision & Dialogue exhibited at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Photo: Joy Cummings Photo.

What is the most rewarding aspect of your artistic practice?

For us, what is most rewarding is having opportunities to offer what we do to the public and to bring others into our conversations. Sharing our works completes us as artists. It fulfills our reasons for being, for making, for doing, for creating worlds that others can relate to. For this to happen, we need to get our work out of our studios and into environments where interconnection can flourish.

Please describe your creative process – how do you approach creating a piece? Do you have any routines, rituals, etc.?

Paul adheres to a disciplined studio routine. Beginning work at 6pm, he often chooses a favourite piece of music based in part, on its length. When it ends, he stops! Jenn spends a lot of time looking at and thinking about her surroundings. Her approach to painting is disciplined and joyful. She often looks to the sky and asks, “What do you want from me?”.

Jennifer Pazienza, left, working, and Paul-Édouard Bourque, right, working. Photo: Amber LeBlanc and Rebecca Beliveau.

What do you think is the greatest challenge or greatest advantage for New Brunswick artists?

Our greatest challenge lies in the fact that there is not enough time in the day to accomplish all we want to do. The advantage: having many places and spaces in the province that support our work.

Creating equitable access to and representation in the arts at the provincial level is ongoing. Over the years, we have experienced the province’s social, cultural and economic shift on the arts. Within the context of gender, class and race, and from our individual and combined places of privilege, we have observed efforts at more equitably advancing and supporting the careers of New Brunswick artists.

For its size, New Brunswick has an extraordinary number of high calibre artists working in all genres. This supports the desire and will to achieve excellence, to belong to this rich environment, and to contribute to it.

Jennifer Pazienza and Paul-Édouard Bourque in dialogue. Photo: Rebecca Beliveau.

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Jennifer Pazienza is an artist and educator born 1954 in Newark, New Jersey. A retired art education professor from the University of New Brunswick (Fredericton), Jennifer is an internationally recognized and award-winning painter whose work is included in private and corporate collections in Canada and beyond. Jennifer lives and works in Keswick Ridge.

Paul Édouard Bourque, is an Acadian painter born in 1956. His work draws on a variety of expressive forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography. Throughout his career, he has taught at university level, has worked as cultural worker and has served as curator for several exhibitions. A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Paul-Édouard lives and works in Moncton.

Follow Jennifer and Paul-Édouard’s artistic practices:
Jennifer Pazienza:
Website: https://www.jenniferpazienza.com/
Instagram : @jenniferpazienza

Paul-Édouard Bourque
Website: https://pauledouardbourque.com/

We would like to thank:
Beaverbrook Art Gallery, John Leroux, Tom Smart, Adda Mihailescu, Dawn Steeves, Michael Doucet, Troy Haines, Jessica Spalding, and Rachel Forestall.
Our donors,
Endeavours & ThinkPlay, Fredericton, NB and Upper Canada Stretchers, Owen Sound, ON. Artist Vicky Lentz, French editor Angele Doucet Leger, photographers, Joy Cummings,
Mathieu Leger and Rebecca Belliveau, Momentum Design+ Print, Fredericton, NB. Heartfelt thanks to our family and friends. Your love and support made this two-year project possible.
We wish to acknowledge the financial contribution and vital support of the New Brunswick Arts Board for the creation of Vision & Dialogue and Faciès.