YAN GIGUÈRE - VISITES LIBRES

YAN GIGUÈRE - VISITES LIBRES

Room 1

Yan Giguère

VISITES LIBRES

EXHIBITION /
MARCH 14 TO APRIL 20, 2013

In Centre CLARK’s main gallery, over 300 photographs of various sizes are arranged on the wall to produce extremely dense sequences. This new project by Yan Giguère, titled Visites libres(2013), explores habitat as a theme, while considering its multiple meanings, including animal, plant and human life. Mounted on wooden frames of varying thicknesses, these photographic prints become voluminous objects on the wall, a well-suited form of presentation for the theme in question, adding a bas-relief to the implied landscape. For example, one can find a wasp’s nest, beehives, a snail dragging its shell, scattered among a multitude of exterior and interior sites wherein the eye traces a path, entering and exiting spaces according to the rhythm suggested by the juxtaposition of assorted snapshots. Populated by figures, these sites acquire an emotional tone that stimulates the imagination. We find ourselves creating links between the individuals and the dwellings portrayed, imagining who belongs to what interior. Presented so as to evoke a long flow of images – each photograph in the sequence touches the one next to it – the groupings created by the artist evoke many atmospheres: the rural, the urban, strangeness and precariousness, which, rather than being in opposition to each other, lead into one another.

An open narrative around the idea of mobility takes shape; images of a flock of geese launching into the sky en route elsewhere, precarious shelters and the frame of a house at an in-between stage, half-way between construction and demolition, highlight this direction. Some photographs are difficult to locate in time due to material differences – the snapshots were taken using a variety of cameras – but this theme is also fueled by the presence of actual vintage photographs, mostly family portraits taken in rural settings. A temporal narrative loop opens and closes in sequences linked to rural life, after having passed through the city, recognized by its buildings but also its density, its crowds and makeshift shelters, which point to the tensions that cohabitation and proximity can give rise to. More obviously than in previous works, the feeling that a cycle is presented here imposes itself on the viewer, who discovers, coexisting on the same plane, portraits showing different generations. The idea of lineage, only concretely evident due to the materiality of the photographic objects that witnessed it, and which persist in time, inscribes itself as the background of the project. That said, as with each of the previous constellations created by Giguère, the narrative always remains open, and multiple entry points are possible in the universe proposed by the artist, who increasingly composes his arrangements with the help of free association and formal echoes gathered between images, with the objective of weaving a linear narrative thread. The small images applied to the sides of the photographic objects give the impression of being forever interchangeable, adding to the idea that in the end, the potential for stories contained within this whole, is infinite.

Anne Marie St-Jean Aubre

Yan Giguère would like to thank Marie Claude Bouthillier, Peter King, Natacha Chamko, Rodrigue Bélanger, Le Centre Vu, L’équipe du Centre Clark and le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.