Darcia Labrosse was born and raised in Montreal, (Quebec, Canada) from Swiss descent where her parent’s apartment housed an art gallery. She grew up surrounded by paintings by Riopelle, Borduas, Cosgrove, the Group of Seven and Inuit soapstones sculptures and prints. Early in life, she understood the mysteries surrounding gallery space: it was sacred. Art shaped who she was to become.
She graduated from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts in film animation and photography; her short films quickly won her critical acclaim. Further studies at Concordia University’s Visual Arts Program, in lithography and painting, led her to question the very meaning of painting and its inherent medium, and the “intimate subjective space we live in, but beyond the other side of appearance.” *
In the last decade, Darcia Labrosse has developed the METAL LANGUAGE and INDUSTRIAL SHAMAN corpus willfully branching out from a Neo- Expressionist tradition, primarily because of “its fierce attachment to psychic self-expression…less a style than an attitude”**.
In the past, Darcia Labrosse has been involved in the literary world, working as an editor, translator, writer and illustrator. She has published over forty books for children in the houses of Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Hyperion and Random House in the USA and the UK. Since 2010, she has also been a pillar in the design of the Artificial Intelligence semantic engineering Internet project IEML (Information Economy Meta Language) at the Collective Intelligence Lab at the University of Ottawa.
* Anthony Gormley, sculptor
** ART Speaks, Robert Atkins, Abbeville Press, 1990