Chloé Beaulac in New Richmond

“Winner of the photographic missions assignment for the Laurentians, Chloé Beaulac took as her first objective rediscovering the family cottage that marked her childhood. That search motivated the month of residency in which the artist’s memories, largely rooted in the Laurentian landscape, were put to the test of reality. For several days he made her way across the area and seized every scrap of memory, instant of surprise and moment of beauty.”

“Beaulac works on the basis of a number of images captured with a diversity of digital and analog pieces of equipment. Reworked, gathered together and amalgamated, these extracts of truths make up a fictive territory closer to her past appreciation of places than to their real states. Through the process of reconstructing the memory and the image, the artist develops a universal representation of the Laurentian landscape.”

“In moving through the region, the artist fills the vacant spaces of her memory with new recollections tinged with her fantasized vision of the Laurentians. This fictitious world takes on a magical, even mystical turn. Each element is skillfully laid out in such a way as to integrate a dose of doubt in the representation. The subjectivity of the composition is authentic to the memories; reality is one belief among others. Beaulac thus exposes some breakthroughs on her own sense of belonging to the area. Her doctored portraits of the landscape are in short a way of anchoring evanescent memories and offering them a land where they can thrive.”

Excerpts from the “Territoires de la mémoire” by Dominique Sirois Rouleau, published in Ciel Variable (No. 116, winter 2021, pp. 20-29)

With a view to documenting the contemporary Québec landscape, Rencontres, with the support of Loto-Québec, partnered with Centre d’exposition de Val-David for this photographic mission carried out in 2019 in the Laurentians.