From September 18 to 27, 2026, LAB-545 presents the exhibition Construction/Conduction, curated by Mathieu Arsenault and Sarah Ève Tousignant. Vernissage / Opening 18.09.26 - 7 PM
The title Construction/Conduction articulates a duality between the materiality of assembly and the fluidity of the immaterial. Construction refers to the act of building, of working directly with matter, while Conduction — the transfer of energy or heat through direct contact — evokes connection and current. These ideas form the foundation of the exhibition, which brings together six artists from Quebec and abroad who explore electricity and electronics for their visual and acoustic properties.
The artists approach electronic components as sculptural objects, paying particular attention to materials, their potential for activation, and their performative dynamics. Through a handcrafted aesthetic, they embrace imperfection while extending the life of materials, revealing electromagnetic phenomena and the invisible pathways of electricity. The works explore the transmission of knowledge, ecofeminism, and the intersection of the body and electricity. By demystifying technological devices that are often opaque, they invite the public to actively, poetically, and politically reclaim everyday objects.
The Artists of Construction / Conduction
Anne-F Jacques
Anne-F Jacques is an artist and tinkerer interested in amplification, oblique interactions between materials, and the construction of various idiosyncratic systems and assemblages. Her (in)attention focuses more specifically on low-tech technologies, ordinary objects, and rough sounds. Her work has been presented by the Tsonami Festival (Chile), Experimental Intermedia (New York), L'Écart (Rouyn-Noranda), Ftarri (Tokyo), CTM (Berlin), Casa del Lago (Mexico), Centrale for Contemporary Arts (Brussels), Paved Arts (Saskatoon), and Sonandes (La Paz), among others.
Darsha Hewitt
Darsha Hewitt uses installation, illustration, video tutorials, Fluxus strategies, jewelry making, DIY electronics, photography, and experimental pedagogy to explore material issues related to music and sound, with an emphasis on agency within technological environments. Drawing on media archaeology, she deconstructs discarded domestic technologies to reveal the power relations embedded within sociotechnical infrastructures. Through participatory formats, she creates opportunities to reclaim and rethink technological practices.
Léa Boudreau
Léa Boudreau is an artist, tinkerer, and educator based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. She creates delicate, playful, kinetic, and sound-based works that celebrate the non-human world and critically address our interspecies relationships. Her work lies at the intersection of electronic design, installation, and sound art. With a dual practice in visual art and music, Léa occupies a distinctive place within the contemporary art ecosystem, situated between two approaches to creation that are sometimes in opposition but often complementary.
Léa creates her works using a DIY (do it yourself) approach that guides the methodological and (counter-)ideological aspects of her projects. Beyond reusing materials and “homemade” fabrication for their aesthetic qualities, DIY functions as an anti-consumerist, collaborative, and optimistic philosophy of creation.
Rehab Hazgui
Rehab Hazgui is a Tunisian transdisciplinary sound artist based in Montreal. Her practice combines composition, analog synthesis, installation, and handcrafted electronics. She develops forms of listening attuned to the transformations of environments, the traces they retain, and the temporalities that move through them.
Her work brings sound ecology into dialogue with speculative archaeology, approaching sound as a living remnant embedded in organisms, materials, objects, and technical systems, then reshaped by time and use. Listening becomes her method of inquiry, a way of examining how sounds emerge, circulate, transform, and remain legible as traces.
Simone Provencher
Simone Provencher is a musician and analog circuit designer based in Montreal. Alongside her practices in exploratory music and improvisation, she is interested in sound manipulation and the elasticity of electronic signals. She approaches analog electronics, made by hand whenever possible, as an almost traditional craft, preserving methods and approaches often considered obsolete by applying them to new explorations, while investigating the aesthetic and sonic consequences that emerge from the persistent use of these technologies. She devotes much of her energy to designing instruments, interfaces, and objects that create permeability between a sensitive instrumental practice and the abstract possibilities of electronic sound sources.
Stephanie Castonguay
Driven by an insatiable curiosity for experimentation, Stephanie Castonguay combines their DIY ethos with the fluid and porous boundaries between sound art, electronic media, and bioart. Guided by an ecofeminist perspective, they advocate for a hands-on, non-expert approach in which repurposed obsolete technologies reveal unexpected sonic delights. Biocomposite records, modified turntables, recycled scanner heads: their devices translate materiality into a decomposing graphic notation, connecting the analog intelligence of touch to our awareness and intimate relationship with nature. Their fragile creations turn impermanence into an active force with an agency of its own, where matter is never controlled but rather encountered.
