[Winter 2024]

Landscape and Automobile
By Michel Hardy-Vallée

[Excerpt]

Recently, driving home from Quebec City, I stopped for hot dogs in Neuville. The setting wasn’t elegant: a gas station with a food concession, surrounded by a lot with vague edges. I wanted something shapeless and soft after spending a full day with intellectually and aesthetically sharp people. Looking at the landscape, in spite of myself I heard a little voice saying, “Don’t take a picture of that, it’s too ordinary.” Even for a connoisseur of ugliness, an aesthete of imperfect things, or a pedant of the picturesque, the place was not extraordinarily ugly, beautiful, or even banal. What, actually, could a photographer see there?

In his project Autoroutes 10-20-55, curated by Mona Hakim, Bertrand Carrière attempts to comprehend the space, the imaginary, the experience, and the socio-political rationale of the highway landscape. It’s an ambitious project, both for its multiple exhibition sites and for its confrontation with shared meaning. The corpus of about a hundred images, compiled during travels in southern Quebec along the three highways cited in the project’s title, documents mainly places and people. It was displayed in two ways. The first was a series of rented billboards along these same highways, near Longueuil, Drummondville, Brossard, and Sherbrooke.1 The second was two pedestrian-accessible installations, one at the entrance to the sports centre at Université de Sherbrooke and the other along the Parcours du lac, near the old presbytery in Saint-Bruno…

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Bertrand Carrière, Autoroutes 10-20-55 — Michel Hardy-Vallée, Landscape and Automobile ]