[Summer 2026]
Indicia
by Michel Hardy-Vallée
Galerie POPOP, Montréal
26.11.2025 — 6.12.2025
[EXCERPT]
Mirror of memory or drawing of nature? The dialectic of processes from the beginnings of photography has never really left us, and it emerges most clearly in the landscape genre. With image-defining hyper-detailed panoramas and panoptic views reminiscent of Ansel Adams, the artists who revived the discourse on landscape at the turn of the 2000s, such as Isabelle Hayeur and Edward Burtynsky, took a critical approach to the visual economy inherited from painting and its extractive gaze at the land. Because photography involves optics and printing simultaneously, however, it creates a dichotomy for artists between the visible and the trace. In an intimate embracing of humus, Normand Rajotte points his lens toward subtle imprints on the ground. Sara Angelucci, with her in situ digitizations, and Michael Flomen and Yves Arcand, with their photograms, try to let nature draw its own image.
Arcand laid sheets of transparent acetate on the ground, in Matanie and in Finland, and let elements accumulate on their surface for timespans of from a few minutes to a few days. These “collectors” (to use Arcand’s term) were then brought into the studio to be digitized and printed in very large formats. The images mobilize a scientific imaginary. On a white background, almost stripped of depth of field apart from the transparency and the thickness of the specimens, they suggest the point of view of a microscope.
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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 132 – TABLEAUX ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: TITRE ARTICLE]
Michel Hardy-Vallée is a historian of photography, independent curator, and Visiting Scholar at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University. His research is concerned with photography books, visual narration, interdisciplinary practices, and the archive, in the contexts of Quebec and Canada. He is the author of Premières planches: photos de John Max (VU, 2025).