Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain presents the first solo exhibition of Luc Courchesne at Centre Space, Toronto. Following his invitation to the Bank of Montreal Project Room in 2011 presenting an interactive portrait of Toronto's streets - this new body of work presented at Centre Space continues the artist's embrace with new technology to convey his unique point of view.
Since space has expanded with now inhabitable virtual folds, the old questions "Where are we from?", "What are we?", and "Where are we headed?" are coming back with new relevance. In framed immersions, Courchesne offers glimpses and sometimes invitations to enter these new terrains of experience. If the work remains photographic in essence, it embraces immersion, dimensionality and interaction in novel ways.
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Luc Courchesne took part in the emergence of media arts thirty years ago, adopting computer technologies as a video artist inspired by a generation of experimental filmmakers such as Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton. First delving into interactive portraiture, a great artistic tradition re-articulated in a new mould, his work has recently turned to another important genre, that of landscape. With his installations, "panoscopic" images, and a device of his own making used to create a sense of visual immersion, he transforms spectators into visitors, actors and inhabitants of his experiential craft.
Born 1952 in Québec, Courchesne received a Bachelor's degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (1974), and a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (1984). He began his explorations in interactive video in 1984 when he co-authored Elastic Movies, one of the earliest experiments in the field, and since produced about 30 installation works and image series including Encyclopedia Chiaroscuro (1987), Portrait One (1990), Family Portrait (1993), Hall of Shadows (1996), Landscape One (1997), Passages(1998), Rendez-vous... (1999), Panoscopic Journal (1999-), Panoscope 360° (2000-), The Visitor: Living by Numbers (2001), Untitled (2004), Where are you? (2005), Horizons (2007), the Shores Series (2008-) and Icons (2009) in a co-creation with artist and choreographer Marie Chouinard.
His work is part of major collections in North America, Europe and Asia and has been shown extensively in galleries and museums worldwide including: the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), Tokyo's InterCommunication Center (ICC), La Villette (Paris), ZKM/Medienmuseum (Karlsruhe), the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada, the Fundacion La Caixa (Barcelona) and Beijing's National Art Museum of China.
Based in Montreal, Luc Courchesne is professor of design at Université de Montréal, founding member of the Society for Art and Technology [SAT], board member of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
