About
ORANGE mandate
ORANGE is a recurring arts event that functions like a living laboratory to explore issues related to art and the agri-food industry through exhibitions, interventions, and seminars. By showcasing the works of professionals from Quebec, elsewhere in Canada, and abroad at locations around the city of Saint-Hyacinthe and in the Kamouraska region, ORANGE aims, among other things, to promote the visual arts across the country and especially in its host regions. Each edition is followed by a publication that builds on the reflection initiated by the event and documents the practices of the participating artists.
History
Founded in 2003 by Marcel Blouin and Mélanie Boucher, then both employees of EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe, ORANGE, L’événement d’art actuel de Saint-Hyacinthe has made a name for itself within the local community, and, nationally in the visual arts sector. Incorporated since January 2006, ORANGE has become an independent organization that is constantly and progressively pursuing its process of maturation and empowerment. In 2003, with the title ORANGE, the first edition of the event presented various aspects linking contemporary art and food. The second edition, como como (2006), took a more political path, the works presented questioned our ways of eating. For the third edition, Il Nostro Gusto (2009), the curators’ reflection was based on the notion of ethics in the agri-food industry. In the fall of 2012, under the title Les Mangeurs, the fourth edition addressed the links between food and death. The two parts (exhibition and performance art) of the fifth edition, Les Viscéraux (2015), offered a reflection on the impulses of hunger and creation. In 2018, the sixth edition, entitled Combining traceability, proposed concrete linkages between the artistic and agricultural worlds around the notion of traceability, the common thread of the event.