Valérie Cain Bourget is a young artist from Cap d'Espoir who is currently completing her Master's degree in visual and media arts at Laval University. The beginning of her professional career has been marked by prestigious invitations from renowned art awards and artist centers. Recipient of the Louise Viger and Tomber dans l'Œil awards in 2023, Cain Bourget held her first exhibition in an artist-run centre in 2024 with Code d'erreur : l'aube at the petite salle de l'Œil de Poisson. In 2025, the artist exhibited collectively at Écart in Rouyn-Noranda and completed a residency at the Sagamie center in Saguenay. She was one of the finalists for the Télé-Québec emerging artist award and has just won the Grantham Foundation's New Horizons award. Valérie Cain Bourget is the first artist invited to participate in the Résidences Cap Gaspésie, long-term residencies followed by an exhibition dedicated to young artists from the Gaspé Peninsula.

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In small, precarious installations and textured videos, his multidisciplinary work consists of creating disenchanted dream worlds, produced with found materials and a limited budget. His references come from a dystopian world evoked by a post-apocalyptic DIY-style organization. Through the organizational reconfiguration of rough materials and elements collected in nature, the artist studies the structures of improvised mechanisms and artisanal devices, built in emergency situations. Cain Bourget draws heavily on the vernacular landscapes of the Gaspé Peninsula, with constant references to the horizon, the sea, and nature, as well as stilts, campfires, and hunting.  The artist explores the aesthetic codes and mechanisms of this type of improvised assembly (traps, shelters, rain collectors, etc.) necessary in a post-apocalyptic context. Whether it is a pebble, a video damaged by compression errors, or insulation from the petrochemical industry, the elements are used in the same way, working outside a hierarchy that would establish their value. Cain Bourget thus gives new presence to the materials she uses in order to continue her reflection on the new rudimentary. The artist questions impermanence and the virtual, and addresses the empathy of synthetic consciousnesses in a post-end context.

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The project she wants to develop at the station focuses on the backyards of houses in rural areas, where all kinds of materials and objects are piled up, kept there “just in case” and left behind during the winter. Once the snow melts, they form unlikely piles that Cain Bourget poetizes: "they are the trailers and rusty cars at the bottom of fields, the marks left in the grass by 2x4 boards and the polyethylene sheets that protect them from the rain. These are the images that have shaped my artistic vision and practice. They have allowed me to pay particular attention to materials in transition, to makeshift forms, to precarious structures that speak as much to the resourcefulness as to the resilience of the working classes outside the major centers. They are also the tracks of bears in the half-melted snow; the rumors of wolverines and cougars; the fires lit in old washing machine barrels; the dull thuds of pieces of ice falling into the sea; the agates left behind after a storm. All these elements run through my artistic practice in an underground way. I would not be the artist I am today without the Gaspé Peninsula. "

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Thus, the residency and exhibition at the Matapédia Station—Artistic and Community Hub represents a major professional opportunity for this young artist from our region, who will undoubtedly integrate into the community. In turn, the community will take pride in supporting an up-and-coming artist from their region.

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