Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is proud to present as part as Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival this exhibition which features new works by Toronto-based photographer Marc Audette and Montreal- and Vancouver-based artist Adad Hannah. Unifying these two bodies of work are the artists' expressive interaction between photographic history, nature, and current technology.
Audette exploits and explores the conventions and technological features of photography, establishing both the limits and the possibilities of the image while creating wonder and incongruity. Through videos, photo projections, back lit and still photos with video overlays, he re-stages core processes for viewing, imagining, and communicating. The Line is a series of photographs in which Audette plays with a custom-made, portable lighting system in forests of the Americas. The bright line of light that runs through the photographs operates like a drawing tool, exploring and embracing the landscape while suggesting narrative possibilities.
Hannah is known for his signature video, photography, and installation works that often reference or re-enact famous artworks. Hannah’s Blackwater Ophelia painstakingly restages the 1852 painting Ophelia by John Everett Millais, drawing attention to the artifice of photographic images. The exhibition also includes works from The Russians, a series set in the Russian countryside, which are based on the early colour-photography techniques of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii.
On Audette's series: La ligne
"The bright line of light that runs through my photos like stroke of pencils engrave a drawing, stems from my desire to simplify my work in nature. I created my one portable lighting system that I can easily put on my shoulders to walk and explore the landscape. This way of doing things is also, for me, a nice way to approach and adopt a contemplative attitude toward my photography. Also, it is a good ploy for letting the light extend her presence and embrace the subject, the place, the scene, the natural landscape, and finally me the photographer placed in front or behind the camera." - Marc Audette
"Foundational technologies in representing the world have undergone rapid development and restructuring in the digital age. Since the mid- 1980s Audette has been concerned with the ways in which the available and corporate digital innovations construct our views. These conventions, enabled in our software go largely unnoticed. They reconstruct our gaze, our imaginations and our understanding of reality and its effects. Audette exploits and explores the conventions and technological features, establishing both the limits and the possibilities of the image. Through videos, photo projections, back lit and still photos with video overlays, Audette re-stages core processes for viewing, imagining and communicating, creating wonder and incongruity. Dominique Ingres, Salvador Dali, and Gustave Courbet, haunt these works in their respective elegance, displacements, and steadfast allegiance to the artist’s role as visionary and harbinger. Their engagements with binary code, so much a fabric of the current media and image landscape are harder to discern. The body is both central and yet, somehow marginal. The dynamic and sumptuous play of colour, drama and light set up a myriad of narrative possibilities, which engage our senses and our faculties of knowing and seeing." - Amy Karlinsky
On Hannah's Blackwater Ophelia
Blackwater Ophelia is inspired by the 1852 painting Ophelia by John Everett Millais, and by a visit Hannah made to the Aamjiwnaang First Nation community in Lambton County, in 2010. "I have liked this painting for a long time; it is so lush and melancholic. It also depicts nature, but nature as seen in the middle of the nineteenth century, a nature laying itself out for the photographic—which is really a nature constructed by and for photography. To restage this scene for photography, in a painstaking manner using silk flowers and a built set draws attention to the artifice of photographic images, while still seducing with the same techniques Millais used 150 years ago. This double reading/double presence is interesting for me, and hopefully for viewers as well." The work was produced with the assistance of the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery. For more information, please consult adadhannah.com/projects/show/blackwater_ophelia
On the Russian Flowers videos, please consult adadhannah.com/projects/show/russian_flowers
The Gallery thanks SODEC for its support.
