In his photographic work, Yan Giguère focuses on our links with the ordinary and common. He is interested in the variety of photographic image production modes and seeks to capture those moments where reality appears beyond the frame. Giguère’s approach works through and with accumulation, that of photographs taken on a daily basis using over ten cameras, that of found and recycled images, that of significant groupings which he creates after selecting and assembling this mass of photographs, or that of the possible network of connections these images suggest once they are brought together. Used as raw material, this proliferating photographic collection leads the artist to question how each image influences the others and is transformed through its contact with neighbouring images. Giguère is fond of the idea that time is not necessarily a succession of moments, but rather their simultaneous eruption.
For several years, Yan Giguère has been particularly concerned with the nature of the photographic fact. Taken from photograms or accidents, some of these images tend towards a formal exploration, a practice that is new to his work. The direct grasping of the image is interrupted and slowed down. The capacity to name something is little by little diluted. The legibility of some images is confronted with the abstraction of some others. It is in this incessant back-and-forth between abstraction and realism that meaning takes shape. The association of images, affects and effects forms a photographic constellation where the referent remains recognizable, while at the same time troubling one’s reading of the picture.
Yan Giguère has had several solo exhibitions, notably the much acclaimed Choisir présented in Montréal at Occurrence gallery, 2007, and Bienvenue at Galerie B 312 in Montréal, 2002. In 2008 he showed his works in Québec City at VU, in Montréal at Optica in 2009 and at Centre CLARK in 2013. His works are part of many public and private collections such as that of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and of the Collection Hydro-Québec. Yan Giguère lives and works in Montréal.
