[Fall 2023]

These are images that disrupt, catch our attention, and thus intensify our gaze. What they show us is clear and precise, and yet there is something we can’t place, sometimes almost imperceptible, that encourages us to look more closely and ask more questions about the context of image production. So, what we are given to see has much to do with the process of fabricating the image and the challenges it opens to the shaping of the world by culture.

NICOLAS BAIER
Vases communicants

The title of Nicolas Baier’s exhibition points to a search for homeostasis – equilibrium – between nature and culture, the two hubs of an osmotic process that puts the organic and the living in relation with the technological achievements that have given human beings their hold over the world. Here, the forest stands in for the profusion and complexity of the living world, whereas the computer is a distillation of the formidable human capacity to act on and transform the world.
with an interview by Jacques Doyon

ADAD HANNAH
Expositions récentes

Working on poses and compositions has always been key to Hannah’s exploration of the image: video portraits that play on photographic stillness; the off-screen propelled into images by mirrors; silhouettes that manipulate, like puppeteers, elements of the composition. The image is a fabrication, a cultural act, equal to the significant artworks that have renewed how we see the world.
with an essay by Sylvain Campeau

THOMAS DEMAND
Le bégaiement de l’histoire

Thomas Demand’s images are at once realistic and fabricated. They avoid the specifics of the highly mediatized dramatic source events and, at the same time, their striking details provide the fictional studio model reconstructions with a kind of realism. Indeed, there is reality in the image, but it is a fabricated reality. As a result, the representation, now indeterminate, opens on a scene in which something might happen once more.
with an essay by Stephen Horne

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Seeing Through Images ]