Janie Julien-Fort
in Marsoui

EXHIBIT

Ephemeral landscapes

Beach promenade | 8, Route Principale Est | Marsoui

Janie Julie-Fort, Montreal (Québec) | janiejfort.com

In 2015, Janie Julien-Fort began the Chantiers sous surveillance (Sites under Surveillance) project. She made and installed hundreds of little pinhole cameras near construction sites that acted as makeshift surveillance cameras tracking the evolution of the sites over time.

These apparatuses use the technique of solargraphy: they have neither a mechanism nor a lens – what happens is, sunlight passes through a tiny pinhole, which results in a print on photosensitive paper. Each picture requires several months of exposure time. At the conclusion of this long cohabitation with the landscape, the pictures unveil their own chaos: the randomness of movements, blurry areas, accidents of light. The world does not appear as harmonious, and our eye loses its bearings: the wavering images of these ephemeral construction sites evoke the fragility of photography and of passing time, just like the subtle traces left by the path of the sun.

The images obtained are listed, mapped and documented, then disseminated online over Google Maps. In 2018, Janie Julien-Fort is carrying on with the project in the Gaspé, where a number of pinhole cameras are installed so that their images can be harvested as part of Rencontres internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie.

EXHIBIT AT RENCONTRES

Ephemeral landscapes

Janie Julien-Fort is interested in what makes each image special and how it can become a world of its own, using older techniques and the material of photography.

An artist from Québec City currently living in Montreal, Janie Julien-Fort has participated in several exhibitions and events in Canada and abroad, including at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin as part of ARTE Video Night Artiste, as well as at the DARE-DARE, Verticale and L’Écart artist centers in Québec. She is the recipient of a number of awards and distinctions, among them the Montreal Emerging Photography Award in 2017.

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.