Numéro 60, avril 2003 Vision

EN :

After linking the genesis of the artist Jean-Philippe Lemay's work to his own personal experience with early mechanisms for capturing light, André Clément analyzes the paradoxical nature of Lemay's photographs, moving back and forth between the modernity of their representation and the outmoded aspect of their aesthetic. He dwells on the mode of fabrication of these images, which cannot be dissociated from the technique used to make them and the meaning that they convey.

EN :

With Parages, Alain Paiement continues his research on the modes of apprehension and representation of space in his main fields of interest, dealing with photography, architecture, cartography, and painting. Here, the rooms of the building in which the artist lives are the subjects of immense frontal-shot photographs hung and arranged in successive layers in the UQAM gallery. Paiement thus multiplies and complexifies points of view in order to destabilize our perception of our own space or, more generally, of our relationship with the world. His exploration of optical phenomena also provides a pretext for exposing the transmutable and precarious character of all forms of structure — perceptual, spatial, or architectural.

EN :

The panoramic photography of Luc Courchesne introduces, within the conventions of traditional panoramic painting, formal and technical variations that significantly alter the aesthetic basis of the genre and require a new theoretics. Formally, in Courchesne's photographs a tension is created between the slightly distorted periphery of the image and the pictorial void created at its centre by the physical presence of the camera and its panoramic lens. This imbalance induces a barely perceptible experience of movement in place, a formal vertigo, that inwardly animates the image. This intensive, or virtual, movement within the fixed image, qualifies the photographs as interactive even in the absence of actual interaction, and can be thought of, in aesthetic continuity with Courchesne's truly interactive installations, as an emergent state of interactive experience.

FR :

L’oeuvre photographique de Melvin Charney s’intéresse à l’expression visuelle de la mécanisation du quotidien dans l’architecture moderniste et en photographie, et à la menace qu’elle représente pour la dimension humaine de la vie urbaine. Puisant dans plusieurs sources écrites et architecturales, Charney joue avec l’échelle et la temporalité pour construire une façon autre de voir la vie quotidienne. En détachant les images de leur origine, il dévoile les conventions régissant notre champ visuel et leurs liens avec des structures sociales concrètes et un environnement physique. Sa réaction aux appareils du pouvoir et à leurs stratégies de contrôle social — urbanisme et médias — montre que, comme le langage, la photographie et l’architecture ne sont pas neutres ou séparées d’une pratique sociale.