Fiona Annis
in Maria

EXHIBIT

To lose North

Parc du Vieux-Quai (Auberge Mowatt) | 550 boulevard Perron | Maria

Fiona Annis, Montreal (Québec) | fionaannis.com

Fiona Annis destabilizes photography to make us lose our bearings. She is interested in the laws of disorder that drive it, and in the possibilities of losing oneself in the photograph by playing with its primary source of existence: light.

Starting with a single sheet of paper, the artists plays with our visual cues by erasing the points of reference known from a two-dimensional picture. She repeatedly manipulates and crushes light-sensitive sheets of paper: thousands of folds and cracks pile up on the surface, some remaining hidden while others are exposed to the light. Born of destructive methods and of accidents, these images reveal their fragility. Each of their flaws evokes a new template for reading the world, penetrated by chaotic processes that offer food for thought about individual and collective disruptions.

Drawing from matter as well as from philosopher Maurice Blanchot (The Writing of the Disaster, 1980) and from NASA scientific data on climate change, Fiona Annis plays with the idea of disaster, and reminds us that the word literally means “losing the stars.” Thus can our gaze open out to an abstract poetry, singular and chaotic.

EXHIBIT AT RENCONTRES

To lose North

Fiona Annis explores different materials, images and technologies to explore the uncanny relationship of photography with the past.

A native of Scotland, she is based in Montreal. Her works have been presented across Québec, Canada and Europe. She also maintains a collaboration with the Society of Affective Archives, founded in 2010, with which she inaugurated her first work of public art, at Montreal’s Mount Royal Park in 2018.

Opening the poetic breaches of chaos

Evocative of catastrophe and upheaval, CHAOS intends to be a bearer of forms both committed and poetic: abstract shapes evoke disaster with Fiona Annis; the landscape is destabilized by way of contemporary technologies for Isabelle Gagné or through old-time photographic techniques for François Quévillon and Janie Julien-Fort. These deconstructed and chaotic forms allow for a nourishing of the breeches in a weakened world thanks to a new, resolutely untimely poetry of the image.