Marc Laforest was born in Laval, Canada, in 1973. He graduated from the University of Quebec in Montreal in art education and also holds a masters in visual arts. He teaches multimedia arts at the Mont-de-la Salle school in Laval and is on the board of the Association Québécoise des Enseignants Spécialisés en Arts Plastiques (AQÉSAP). He has taken part in several solo and collaborative exhibitions in Canada and France. Since 2011 he has covered the New York Arts Week, on which subject he writes for the magazines Vie des arts and Vision.
His residency project at the Château de Goutelas in 2019, with Gilbert Gosselin, was on the theme of creating social links: whether one is the host or the guest, there is a mutual desire to come together. In a new situation, such as meeting new people, we re-live our childhood fears and feel again the fear of not being accepted. There is a need for a place where connections can be encouraged, and from this came the artistic installation. In ‘La place à Ti-cul’, an oversized table and chair invite the visitor into a game of hospitality. One of the distinctive features of the installation is its size, with the table as kind of shelter; the other is the castle, made from local bricks and sitting in the shade of the table. The bricks are coloured, like in a child’s toy, and this play space invites us to experience again the comfort that a child feels while playing with their favourite toy underneath the kitchen table.