Isabelle Gagné
at Carleton-sur-Mer

EXHIBIT

Stratotype digital-ien

Municipal beach | Boulevard Perron (near Rue du Quai) | Carleton-sur-Mer (Carleton sector)

Isabelle Gagné, Mirabel (Québec) | stratotype.ca

An artist-geologist of the digital image, Isabelle Gagné revisits our memory and our relationship with the natural and collective patrimony. She collected over the space of one year photographs from each of the regions of Québec to create a new virtual archive of the province’s landscape.

With the help of an anonymous bot, these pictures taken or sent along by participating citizens have been randomly recomposed and then placed online over the platform stratotype.ca. To the original photos the bot adds excerpts from pictures found on Google Images, which it selects thanks to a system of connections between similar geomorphologies or colors. Thus is born a new generation of images, at the crossroads of new technologies and photography. The artist brings about a singular visual chaos, the result of the encounter between circumstances and unusual visual associations that deform the image and thus muddle our reading of it.

Inaugurated as part of the artist’s residency in the Gaspé Peninsula in 2017, Stratotype digital-ien managed to collect close to 2,000 pictures: amateur, touristic, trivial or formal shots that make up a broad bank of remixed data, offering the present day – marked by the Web and its search engines – a living virtual archive.

EXHIBIT AT RENCONTRES

Stratotype digital-ien

Isabelle Gagné documents the natural landscape of Québec in the course of her real and virtual journeys, then reinterprets them with digital modifications.

A digital artist and cofounder of Mouvement Art Mobile, she has presented her work in individual and collective exhibits in Canada and abroad, from Saint-Jérôme to Osaka.

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.