Ornament and pattern, delicacy and craftsmanship. These words define the fundamental elements dictating Dion’s artistic practice, through which she is committed to restoring the dignity of traditional manual work, revaluing the essence of the work it involves and praising artisanal virtuosity. In doing so, her practice contrasts with the frenetic pace of today’s consumerist society and its ephemerality. The beautifying process she operates on the newspapers’ pages intends to distract the onlooker from its usual informative function and instigate a contemplative experience instead. The project she proposes to undertake for NARS residency program wishes to re-actualize the question of the status granted to the applied arts in the contemporary art discourse and to challenge the normative values associated with artistic categories.
Dion lives and works in Montreal where she is represented by Blouin-Division gallery. She is graduated from the MFA program at UQAM and her works have been presented in many solo and group exhibitions, including at the MNBAQ, the London Museum (ON), the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies and Rijswijk Museum (Netherlands). Dion was the recipient of numerous grants, notably the Canada Council for the Arts and the Post-Residency Award of the Banff Center. In 2019, she was part of an exhibition at the Sharjah Art Museum in the United Arab Emirates. Her works are also part of several public collections including ARBZ-Visual Art Collection-Global Affairs, MNBAQ, MACM, Loto-Québec, TD Bank, Scotia Bank and private collections in Canada and in USA.
