Night Ship, Navire de Nuit: An Exhibition of Works by Jannick Deslauriers and Angus Trudeau

Night Ship, Navire de Nuit is a beguiling pairing of sculpture and painting by artists Jannick Deslauriers and Angus Trudeau (b. 1907 – d. 1984). As two artists separated by generations and backgrounds – Deslauriers, a millennial artist with an arts degree from Yale from Montreal and Trudeau, a self-taught Indigenous artist from Georgian Bay who lived through both World Wars, and who died before Deslauriers was born – their work finds common ground and fascinating contrast through realism, materials, a curiosity for the fleeting and monumental nature of everyday life in port cities along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. Each artist is drawn toward the aura of ships, the precision of model-making, and the scale of industry.

Deslauriers’s large-scale ship, suspended as an apparition, and miniature shipping containers of delicate tulle, gauze and thread are silent eulogies on the scale of industry and forces of change. On the walls, Trudeau’s painted portraits of ships – a selection of works from the Gallery’s collection – are tributes to vessels he worked on as a teenage cook and adult labourer on the Great Lakes. Simple, complicated, and personal, these works pass through time and space like ships in the night.

Artist Biographies:

Jannick Deslauriers was born in Joliette, Quebec, in 1983, and lives and works in Montreal. She earned a BFA from Concordia University in 2008 and taught visual arts at Cégep Marie-Victorin from 2008 to 2020. Between 2020 and 2022, Deslauriers completed an MFA in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art in Connecticut. She is the recipient of numerous distinctions and grants, including the Susan H. Whedon Award for Outstanding Student in Sculpture from Yale University. This is her first exhibition in Thunder Bay.

Deslauriers has exhibited in Quebec and Ontario, notably at the Musée d’art de Joliette (2011), the Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine de Trois-Rivières (2014), and Projet Casa (2020). She has also taken part in group exhibitions in the United Sates, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy, including Miniartexil (2014-2015), the Sharjah Islamic Arts Festival (2016), and Terra Nova in Venice (2022). Her work has been featured in various publications, and her sculptural works are in the collections of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the West Collection at SEI, Oaks, Pennsylvania, and many corporate and private collections.

Angus Trudeau (Odawa) (b. 1907 – d. 1984) was from Whiskey Island in Georgian Bay, Ontario, and was born into a thriving, century-old, maritime tradition. From the age of twelve, Trudeau worked on Great Lakes freighters as a cook and on shore as a logger. When he retired in the mid-1970s, Trudeau devoted his life to making ship portraits, painting local scenes, and creating ship models, including many of the vessels he had served on. Trudeau was self-taught and often worked in acrylic on canvas; he also has work in mixed media: paint, pencil, coloured pencil, and marker. He sometimes clipped the ship names from a newspaper. Trudeau’s work has been exhibited across Canada and in England and is represented in the collections of the Canadian Museum of History, Ottawa; the Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, Ontario; Laurentian University Museum, Sudbury, Ontario; and Esso Resources, and more.

Image 1: Jannick Deslauriers, Paquebot, 2019, Steel, nylon, tulle, silk and thread 68 x 78 x 39 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Image 2: Angus Trudeau, Carol Lake /Night Scene, enamel paint on Bristol board, 1978. Gift of The Helen E. Band Collection, 1994.