Biography

Sophie Kurtness is a multidisciplinary Innu artist from the Mashteuiatsh community. She holds an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in art from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. Her work has been showcased at the Musée de Mashteuiatsh on several occasions, as well as at Séquence (Chicoutimi), Espace F (Matane), Maison de la culture Frontenac (Montréal), and in 2023 at the Galerie de L’UQAM. She was engaged in a creative residency at the artist centre The LOBE in 2022. Sophie Kurtness has taken part in several art-nature symposiums, including in Mashteuiatsh and Mexico. She was co-artistic director of the new permanent exhibition at the Musée amérindien de Mashteuiatsh, which received the Excellence Award from the Canadian Museums Association. Her preferred mediums are painting and installation, with her works serving as representations and sources of inspiration drawn from Nitassinan, the territory and culture of the Pekuakamiulnuatsh.

Connexion (2021)

The artist’s work expresses the link between the Innus and the Earth, the spirits and the animals. Her work is a fusion of sensitivity and strength, of what we see and what we feel. It is subtle, poetic, intelligent and sometimes disturbing. With this body of work, created as part of the D’ici et d’ailleurs (From here to there) event at the Espace F artist-run centre in Matane in 2021, she delves into the imperative to connect with reality through the virtual. This series of paintings gives access, via a mock QR code, to other paintings that take us into her magnificent, colorful world, that bears witness to her intimate relationship with the forest. The perspective framed by the mobile phone screen immerses us in the artist’s perspective, as if we were embodying her and navigating the territory through her eyes. Beyond questioning our relationship with the world, through the themes of connection/disconnection, the artist questions the utilization of both pictorial and digital codes.