Chanel DesRoches is an artist working in painting, drawing, and printmaking based in
Guelph, Ontario. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (2024) from York University and a
Bachelor of Arts, Honours (2019) in studio art from the University of Guelph. Her
practice involves large-scale painting and drawing, investigating themes around muscle
memory, distraction, tactics, identity, and materiality. Surrounding the surface with
constant interruption and infinite misguiding, the tangling of painterly gestures and
sporadic mark-making brings forward feelings of overwhelm. Expressed in her painting,
she often leans on deflection tactics as an easy escape and avoidance strategy in social
interactions or conversations that provoke dialogue and reflection from her younger self.
Her practice involves pretending, improvising, and reacting to each mark, gesture,
colour, and form, obsessively intrigued by the emergence of material interactions.
Driving from personal experience, Chanel relentlessly engages with painting in the
moment, allowing herself to interchangeably utilize intuition and compulsion as a means
for mark making.
DesRoches is a scholarship recipient of the Social Sciences & Humanities Research
Council (SSHRC) and has exhibited her work with Peter Robertson Gallery (Edmonton,
AB), Birch Contemporary (Toronto, ON), Art Mûr (Montreal, QC), Lalani Jennings
Contemporary Art (Guelph, ON), York University (Toronto, ON), and the City of Guelph.
Currently, she is working as a sessional faculty member with the visual arts department
at Brock University (St. Catharines, ON).