[Fall 2025]
Luminous Imprints
by Pierre Dessureault
[EXCERPT]
Since 1994, Marie-Jeanne Musiol has been engaged in a unique exploration of the porous borders between how science and art represent nature. Most of the images in the exhibition I See Stars in the Deep Dark were from the series Bodies of Light and were made between 2018 and 2024. The small-format photographs, deployed in constellations on the gallery’s white walls, presented energy imprints of botanical specimens produced by electrophotography, also called Kirlian photography after its inventors, the Soviet researchers Valentina and Semyon Kirlian, in 1939. “In electrophotography, or energy photography,” Musiol writes, “a body (human organ, plant, water, mineral) is penetrated by an electromagnetic discharge that causes a luminous corona to appear. Thanks to a camera-free technique related to the photogram, the image of the corona is immediately recorded on the analogical surface of film or photographic paper.”
By imbuing an image with the profusion of the visible world revealed in the tangled flow of perception and the momentary gaze, science and art unite in a process of deciphering and learning about the natural world. Musiol is following in the footsteps of pioneers of a medium with the marvellous power to fix “fairy pictures, creation of a moment” and through which “natural objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid of the artist’s pencil.”
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 130 – PLANTS AND GARDENS ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Luminous Imprints]
Pierre Dessureault, a specialist in Quebec and Canadian photography, has curated more than fifty exhibitions and published books and articles on the subject.