Artist Statement 

Escaping the confines of one reality and entering an alternate reality is often where I find meaning within the complexity of the mind and the emotions it houses. My work is an ongoing question: how to build a common world when the one we inhabit I oppose. 

I intersect working from observation with exploring internal spaces like memory, tracings and narratives of painting.  The poetic interiority of my work aims for generative conversation within the viewing experience.

The Anonymous Citizen series aims to challenge the idea of naming, exploring ideas of “we” versus the individual. I am constantly investigating the use of color as if it were a machine exploring human rights within color theory and the portrait. The focus is on the relationships of colors versus color in isolation, which can be seen as a metaphor for identity when imperialism is critiqued as a system not an event.

Biography

Renée Bouchard was awarded the prestigious Pollock-Krasner grant and the Puffin Foundation grant in 2023 after receiving an MFA in visual art from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2021. Other awards include: the Vermont Individual Artist Grant and the Power of Art Grant for teaching art to students with Learning Disabilities from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Bouchard has exhibited at institutions nationally, including her solo exhibitions: Kaleidoscopic Pathos, at the Vermont State House's Governor's Gallery, We The People, at Southern Vermont College, and Allegory of Prudence, at the LA Arts Center.  Other exhibitions and lectures were held at the Lyman Allyn Museum, Bennington Museum, Union College, University of Maine; Augusta, Connecticut College, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts: Gallery 51, University of Massachusetts; Amherst, University of Southern Maine, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and the ICA at Maine College of Art & Design. She has been an artist-in-residence at Artspace New Haven, the Vermont Studio Center, the Cooper Union and the Kate Millett Art Colony for Women. Her 2021 essay Artist/Mother/Quarantine was published in Isele Magazine.  She received her BFA in painting, with honors, from the Maine College of Art in 1999. She is a volunteer advocate/counselor for the Project Against Violent Encounters in Vermont.