Marie-Pascale Lafrenière (she/her) is a visual artist and educator from Gatineau QC, situated on Algonquin territories. Her practice in photography, video and performance borrows the codes of post-feminist capitalism to create absurdist mise-en-scènes. She questions the maintenance and improvement of feminine bodies, presented as leisure in media, but experiences as alienated labour. With her references to the language of work environments, not only general but also specific to the art world, her practice tackles beauty rituals as self-preservation in a world where appearance is an investment into social and financial capital. Her sleek but absurd and alienating artworks aim to highlight these contradictions and paradoxes between leisure and labour, beauty and violence, health and illness.

Marie-Pascale Lafrenière lives and works in Vancouver BC, on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territories. She teaches film and medio theory at Emily Carr University, where she graduated from her MFA in 2019. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and the United states, including at YacTac (Vancouver, 2020), The Cultch (Vancouver 2019), L'Entre-Deux (Gatineau, 2019), University of Montana (Missoula, 2018), DeConstrukt (Brooklyn, 2018), and Gamman House (Ottawa, 2018). Her photographs have been published in Lady Zine (Seattle, 2020) and Woo Publication (Vancouver, 2018) and she collaborated as an author to the online edition of Femme Art Review (Vancouver, 2018).