[Summer 2019]
Three recent exhibitions offer a rare look at the act of collecting. In Archipel, Serge Clément presents a collection of all the photobooks that he has made – books that can be seen as sequencings of collections of his own images. Bertrand Carrière immerses himself in the collection of the Cinémathèque québécoise, focusing on film noir, extracting paradigmatic images and exploring the plays on temporality inherent to the crossfade. Finally, the collection of Jack Lazare represents a rare example of a collection patiently assembled over the years to reflect a melancholic vision of a world in difficulty.
BERTRAND CARRIÈRE Tout ceci est impossible
Bertrand Carrière’s project results from a working residency in the film collection of the Cinémathèque québécoise. Taking inspiration from his preceding series, Images-temps (1997–2000), Carrière specifically explores the world of film noir by focusing on the crossfade, the emblematic procedure for temporal juxtapositions in film. The result is a series of sequence strips, Images noires, which he contrasts with colour images from films noirs that breach the darkness in Écrans lumineux.
With an essay by Sylvain Campeau
SERGE CLÉMENT Archipel
The Archipel project – at once a photographic series, an exhibition, and a publication – offers a look at the central place of the photobook in Serge Clément’s practice. Books are Clément’s favourite medium for exploring the narrative dimension of images. Here, he redeploys all of his own publications in a sort of “collection of collections” of all of the photobooks that he has made, and adds Archipel, a new sequencing of already-published images.
With an essay by Alexis Desgagnés
COLLECTION LAZARE États d’âmes, esprit des lieux
Collector Jack Lazare’s donation of over thirty photographs to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts offered the perfect opportunity to explore the specific sensibility of a personal collection that reflects a vision of the world imbued with melancholy. The works by Julia Margaret Cameron are emblematic of the state of mind that inhabits the portraits in the exhibition and resonates with the landscapes and urban environments, many of which cast a critical eye on the current state of society.
With an essay by Colette Tougas