Marie-Jeanne Musiol: Miroirs du cosmos

Ottawa-based Arc Poetry Magazine is heading on down the 417 to Montreal for the launch of its latest issue. Pierre-Francois Ouellette art contemporain will host the event as part of the festivities marking the end of Marie-Jeanne Musiol's Miroirs du cosmos exhibition there on December 2, 2006. 

Arc 57 features Arc's international Poem of the Year Contest winners and editors' choices along with the winners of the Diana Brebner Prize, which celebrates work by National Capital Region poets yet to publish in book form. Poets Alexandra Pasian and Mark Frutkin, as well as this year's Brebner Prize winner, Rhonda Douglas, and honourable mention, Sandra Ridley, will read from their selections in the latest Arc.

The event runs from 3:30 to 5:30 pm. 

The gallery is pleased to celebrate its 5th anniversary by inviting you to the vernissage of Marie-Jeanne Musiol's exhibition Miroirs du cosmos on Saturday October 21 from 2:30 to 5:30. The artist will be presenting a new series of photographs mounted in lightboxes and a 15 mn video with a soundtrack by John Mark Seck et Alvaro de Minaya. The artist states:

"After having recorded the light imprint of numerous plants to constitute a small energy botany, I set out to probe the bright corona surrounding them. With a video tool, I entered their body of light and some particularities of the topography suddenly became apparent: configurations of explosions, cocoons or streams of light, incandescence, black holes. Light surrounding the plant recorded in its electromagnetic field also contains in its ethereal substance a mirror image of the cosmos. In a surprising inversion of scale, the structures of the infinite seen through the Hubble telescope appear wrapped and contained in the streams of light emanating from the living. 

Curiously, this parabolic effect becomes manifest at the cross-road of analog and digital probing. The light field of the plant is captured on a black-and-white negative. Observed through the naked eye or printed on photographic paper, the cosmic deployment in the light field of the plant is not apparent. But once scanned, the negative yields information with cosmic echoes buried in the silver layer. A third dimension is revealed in the image where matter appears to become a substrate of light with its surprising mirror forms. 

Mirrors of the Cosmos maps out five different itineraries where the topography of four plants and a mineral guide the video at the heart of this terra incognita. The details vary from one plant to another - from plectranthus to female fern - to create an unexpected survey of a natural irradiating universe. Some fifteen light boxes for their part freeze details, particular moments, framings of landscapes appearing and organizing in space: figures of planets, constellations, black holes. Here the photographic image goes from digital to positive transparency. The apparent grain evokes the origins of the light photographs, reminiscent of the "radiant" forest where Goethe would experience mystical enlightenment. What is the most startling observation of this voyage to the heart of the light of plants? The total immersion of plants in a luminous state, including the zones of dark energy."

 

The gallery is proud to inform you that the current issue of the photography magazine CV ciel variable (no 70) contains several reproductions of these works which accompany an article by Sylvain Campeau. Also of note is that the poetry magazine ARC will publish in their next issue (no. 57) another group of photographs from the series.. A poetry reading and artist's talk will take place at the gallery on 2 December during the launch of the magazine. 

The photographic installations by Marie-Jeanne Musiol have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Canada and abroad. Her installation Bodies of Light has been presented at La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris as part of the exhibition Résonances which travelled at ZKM in Karlsruhe in Germany, at Conde Duque Medialab in Madrid, at V2/ Tent in Rotterdam et at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest.

Whether it is through the portrait, the landscape, or electromagnetic photography, Marie-Jeanne Musiol explores different levels of the image's emergence on paper and the limits of photographic representation. She endeavours to capture the intangible qualities of her subjects through black and white photography. Concerned with the relationship between matter, energy, and memory, Musiol's work has led her to the Kirlian process, which captures the energy field of objects that have been subjected to an electromagnetic-wave discharge. Musiol further develops this idea into what she describes as "a directory of energy configurations in which the imprint of objects and thought-forms modifying living things is encoded in light."

Marie-Jeanne Musiol's photographic installations have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Canada and abroad : Galerie Aubes, Montreal (1988); The Canadian Cultural Centre, Rome (1989); The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa (1992, 1993); the Liana and Danny Taran Gallery, Montreal (1994); Vox image contemporaine, Montreal (1995); The Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal (1995); Galerie Yves LeRoux, Montreal (1996); the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec City (1996); Les Brasseurs, Liège, Belgium and Centre d'Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona (1996); Le Mois de la Photo, Montreal (1997); Gallery 44, Toronto (1996,1999,2004); The Montreal Commemorative Center for the Holocaust (2000); Dazibao, Montreal (2001); The Ottawa Art Gallery (1993, 2001,2002,2003); AxeNéo7, Gatineau (1991, 2002); The Armando Museum, Amersfoort, Holland (2002); the Musée d'art urbain, Montreal (2002/2004); Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal (2003, 2006); La Galerie des Grands Bains Douches, Marseille, France (2003); Oboro, Montreal (2005); The Montreal Botanical Garden (2005); ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2005), Conde Duque Medialab, Madrid; V2/Tent, Rotterdam; Ludwig Museum, Budapest and La Maison Européenne de la photographie, Paris (2006).

She has produced limited edition books: Le trou noir de l'histoire (1989), Sept ouvertures (1991) and In the Shadow of the Forest (Auschwitz-Birkenau) (1998). She has also worked extensively in Auschwitz, probing the nature of living memory through a series of photographic installations and a video titled Do Falling Leaves Go Unseen (1995). The video Bodies of Light. Fields of Light. States (2000) registers various aspects of electromagnetic fields around plants. The book Bodies of Light published in 2001 presents recordings of energy emissions around biological bodies and has won numerous design awards. Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Bibliothèque nationale du Québec; National Library of Canada; Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, The Ottawa Art Gallery and Musée d'art urbain de Montréal among others. For more information on Marie-Jeanne Musiol consult her personal website.

ARTICLES

Mavrikakis Nicolas, Voir, Etre branché, 5 mai 2005, p53

Crevier, Lyne. Ici, Fluide glacial, du 28 avril au mai 4 2005, 31