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16/1/2009

Luc Courchsene

Pierre Francois Ouellette - Belgo Building, Montreal

Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent works by Luc Courchsene, featuring the premiere of a new video piece created in collaboration with renowned choreographer and artist Marie Chiounard, with the special participation of dansers Carol Prieur and Mark Eden-Towie.

Having dealt with landscape and the idea of immersion for the last decade, Luc Courchesne’s photographic work has drawn out the visual and symbolic significance of boundaries, abrupt transitions, thresholds. In the last two years, adapting his panoramic optical systems to video, Courchesne has focused his attention on seashores—the locus, he finds, of perpetually changing boundaries, a kind of continuous negotiation between two states, the dynamic meeting of two emphatically different and mutually transformative substances. Here, Courchesne tells us, one may read a metaphor for interpersonal relationships and the occasion for a fascinating artistic experience that consists in observing a line formed and transformed in a process at once repetitive and random.

Courchesne is presenting in parallel three series of works side by side. The first is inspired by thoughts on the motivations underpinning his investigations into visual immersion, which led him to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and some of Rousseau’s late 18th-century contemporaries: while Rousseau, in his Confessions, gave birth to the “introspective subject,” others—Barker and De Saussure—developed the very first techniques of immersive imagery. A second series presents nocturnal scenes pointing back to Courchesne’s work in the 1980s on light and darkness and the connections between imagination and lighting. The third series presents the initial results of collaborative work that Courchesne began in 2008 with artist and choreographer Marie Chouinard.

Luc Courchesne took part in the emergence of media arts twenty-five years ago, when, as a video artist inspired by a generation of experimental filmmakers including Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton, he discovered computer technologies. First delving into interactive portraiture — a great artistic tradition re-articulated in a new mould — his work has recently turned to another important genre, that of landscape. With his installations, "panoscopic" images, and a device of his own making used to create a sense of visual immersion, he transforms the spectator into a visitor whom he leads, like Alice, through the looking glass.

Luc Courchesne was born in 1952 in St-Léonard d’Aston, Québec. He received a Bachelor’s degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (1974), and a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (1984). Courchesne began his explorations in interactive video in 1984 when he co-authored Elastic Movies, one of the earliest experiments in the field. He has since produced about 30 installation works and image series including: Encyclopedia Chiaroscuro (1987), Portrait One (1990), Family Portrait (1993), Hall of Shadows (1996), Landscape One (1997), Passages (1998), Rendez-vous… (1999), Panoscopic Journal (1999-), Panoscope 360° (2000), The Visitor: Living by Numbers (2001), Untitled (2004) and Where are you? (2005).

His work is part of major collections in North America, Europe and Asia and has been shown extensively in galleries and museums worldwide including: Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo’s InterCommunication Center (ICC), Paris’ La Villette, Karlsruhe’s ZKM/Medienmuseum, Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal, National Gallery of Canada, Fundació La Caixa, Barcelona. For more information on Luc Courchesne's work, please visit his page on the website of the Daniel Langlois Foundation.

Pierre Francois Ouellette - Belgo Building
372 Ste-Catherine Street West, suite 216 - Montreal

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