Noir sirène
In June of 2016, I travelled to Norway as a tourist. A few years later, I returned to the photos I had taken there and started editing them, with the goal of turning down the glow of the midnight sun. I then integrated these landscapes into the scenery of Métabetchouan-Lac-à-la-Croix, a small town on the banks of Pekuakami (Quebec, Canada), where I live. To exhibit the photographs, I carefully selected several outdoor sites, some close to one another, others further apart, but always chosen so as to fully flesh out the images and engage with them. With help from discreet and well-thought-out signage, passers-by were invited to visit the images at any time of the day or night.
In our daily lives, we often move through the same familiar and reassuring landscapes. By force of habit, do we sometimes forget to really stop and look at our surroundings? Perhaps we take them for granted, or at least until a tree we’ve always known is struck by lightning and falls on a friend’s house down the street, lighting it on fire. But we aren’t blind. So what is it that distracts our gaze, to the extent that we are willing to sacrifice that which surrounds us?
Transplanting an unfamiliar landscape into a familiar landscape thus embodies an attempt to awaken our gaze in the here and now. Making this far-off landscape so delicately visible that the eyes stop to take it in. Not because of its light, but rather because what lingers here in the darkness is precisely what we aren’t expecting to see. That which is lost in the fog of images can perhaps act as an alarm.
2019
Digital photographs
Latex prints on wallpaper
Self-supporting wooden structures
Noir sirène 02
Roadside land
12×8′
Noir sirène 08
Swamp forest trail
3×5′
Noir sirène 18
Giant kettle abyss
6×12′
Noir sirène 17
Lake shoreline
4×6′
Noir sirène 21
Golden hour at arboretum
10×7′
Noir sirène 16
Blue hour at arboretum
10×7′
