De l’écran à la pierre

-Gallery I-

De l’écran à la pierre

Digital technologies are now omnipresent in our lives. Their dizzying power of attraction and influence are perceptible in many spheres of society. And the new artistic possibilities they offer an increasing number of artists, who are creating new forms of materiality. Today, digitization, modeling and 3D printing are widely used modes of production. How does this affect and transform the practice of sculpture? This questionning is at the root of Andrée-Anne Carrier’s exhibition De l’écran à la pierre, which combines sculpture and installation works that allude to the fabrication tools of 3D imaging. The works presented here are handmade and have a certain fascination that is similar to that of screens.

Within this exhibition, which entangles temporalities, Andrée-Anne Carrier was interested in revealing the transitory states used during the passage from the screen to the object or from the object to the screen. First, the digital fossils, as she calls them, are made from screen captures of digitized objects and then transposed onto the dark anthracite grey stones. Similar to X-ray images, the reduced-scale prints are presented as witnesses of our time, specimens of screen culture. The multiplication of screens and the circular display that surrounds us recall their dominant presence in our lives and their accelerated development. Fluorescent lights, the effects of transparency and opacity, of floating and flattening, of superposition, of reversal and rotation propose various investigations about trompe-l’oeil, the materiality of the screen and the bright light that emanates from it.

Then, multiple objects, having a sandy finish, evoke material remains left by individuals or human societies: these are formed through a technique of soaking and accumulating sand on the surface. Screening the object, this process of erasure, smooths out the object’s own characteristics, making them flat. This play between materiality and dematerialization is particularly striking in the grid structures with their light and dark tones that recall the 3D mesh or in La collection du technophile, which brings together a selection of tools that surround the artist on a daily basis in the studio. Due to various strategies the artist uses and the movement of the body in space, an optical phenomenon occurs and makes reliefs and volume appear and disappear. According to a certain angle, visitors are led to have an illusory experience of the 3D form changing to that of the 2D.

Notions of the screen, light, digital and physical fluctuations, and two- and three-dimensional space well-define the nature of the material experiments that Andrée-Anne Carrier is implementing in this recent body of work. Through a reflection on the practice of sculpture in the digital age, she materializes the way in which digital technologies affect our perceptions, questioning the multiple facets of digital tools and the links that are established between the object and the screen in their fruitful interferences.

– Anne Philippon

Author Biography
Anne Philippon holds a master’s degree in études en arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Since 2016, she has been assistant curator at the Galerie de l’UQAM, where she manages the UQAM Art Collection, coordinates the presentation of exhibitions and their circulation, as well as the production of publications. As a curator, she has overseen various exhibition projects, notably at the Maison de la culture de Longueuil (Denis Rousseau, 2019), at EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe (Karine Payette, 2017), at the Salle Alfred-Pellan of the Maison des arts de Laval (Nicolas Fleming and Sonia Haberstich, 2015), and at the Galerie de l’UQAM (group exhibitions, 2022, 2019 and 2013). She also regularly contributes articles to various art publications on a variety of topics related to current artistic practices.

Artist Biography
Originally from Joliette, Andrée-Anne Carrier has lived and worked in Montreal since 2009. Her sculptural work engages with domestic objects from mass culture, often generic and recognizable: popular knick-knacks, everyday accomplices, markers of time and reminders of events. Using casting and other fabrication techniques as processes of alteration, her artistic practice becomes a laboratory-space; a place where the material integrity of things is allowed to be disrupted in order to thwart the senses, question materiality and (re)visit the sacred.

Carrier is a graduate of UQAM’s MFA in Visual and Media Arts, during which she was the recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC-2014). Her sculptural work has been presented in several group exhibitions, notably Matérialité (2021) at CIRCA and Banlieue! Ordre et désordre (2015) at the Maison des arts de Laval. Her presence at the Foire d’art contemporain de Saint-Lambert earned her the jury prize: Bourse de la FAC 2016.

The works presented in this exhibition are the result of research and creation residency at centre SAGAMIE and received support from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec.

The artist would like to thank her partner Maxime Desroches for his constant support, Annie Concecao-Rivest for the exchange of knowledge and ideas, Jules Lasalle for his indispensable technical support and for generously opening the doors of his studio to her once again, Anne Philippon for her critical sense and her commitment to the writing of the exhibition text, Jean-François Gauthier for sharing his technical know-how in digitization and 3D modeling, Émilie Granjon for having so well targeted the stakes of her artistic approach at the end of their various exchanges, to the members of the Centre SAGAMIE team for their technical support and their openness to let plaster enter their beautiful residency studio, as well as to the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) and the Conseil des arts de Montréal (CAM) for funding the production and research materialized in this exhibition.

Photo credit : Jean-Michael Seminaro