Océane Buxton. Prophétesse

Galerie de l’UQAM welcomes Prophétesse, an exhibition by Océane Buxton, a graduating master’s student in Visual and Media Arts at UQAM. The exhibition straddles the line between documentary and folklore, where the collective desire to gossip and reinvent certain stories arises.

The exhibition

Prophétesse is a photography, video art, and found artifacts exhibition that exists in a grey area between reality and fiction. It examines how public figures construct narratives around themselves, and how these self-made myths travel from mouth to ear. The exhibition blends documentary investigation and gossip, while also reflecting on the connection between celebrity culture and urban legends.

The project began when an anonymous friend of Océane Buxton noticed her physical resemblance to Modeste Niquette, a polarizing local figure from Thetford Mines whom he had known in the past. Modeste claimed to have recurring encounters with extraterrestrial forces, which she documented through photography. She distributed her pictures among residents and delivered prophecies that provoked strong reactions. The woman was later reported missing under troubling circumstances but received little attention from the media. Her unexplained disappearance has fuelled a mythical status in the folklore of her hometown. Deeply moved by this story, Océane Buxton, in collaboration with the anonymous witness, sets out to reconstruct the portrait of this ghostly figure.

Borrowing the visual language of tourist attractions such as Ripley’s Believe It or Not! or Planet Hollywood, which display eclectic relics of popular culture, the exhibition brings together photographs, found objects, and fragments of archives attributed to Modeste Niquette, set in dialogue with the witness’s memories. It deliberately blurs genres, creating an unsettling gap between contemporary art installation and sensationalist collection built around a mythical figure. Prophétesse unfolds at the edge of the real, where the collective impulse to gossip and reinvent certain stories takes form.

About the artist

Océane Buxton is a visual artist whose practice ranges from video and photography to sound design, textiles, digital art, and performance. Fascinated by Hollywood folklore, Quebec stardom, and urban legends circulating on the Internet, the artist observes media personalities while exploring her own way of looking at them. Originally from Quebec City and based in Montreal since 2017, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Intermedia/Cyberarts from Concordia University (2021) and pursued part of her training at the RMIT School of Art in Melbourne, Australia, in 2019. She’s been studying for a master’s degree in visual and media arts at UQAM since fall 2023. She took part in the sixth edition of the artch emerging art festival, and her work has been shown by Ada X, AXENÉO7, La Bande Vidéo, the Musée d’art de Joliette, and the Galerie Galerie web art platform. In 2021, driven by her curiosity about the entertainment industry, she took part in the culinary reality TV show Un souper presque parfait.