La laisse
January 21 - March 4, 2017
We are very pleased to present La laisse, Anne-Renée Hotte’s new exhibition, presented from January 21st to March 4th 2017. Combining video and photographic works whit a strong relationship to sculpture and installation, Hotte fully inhabits our second exhibition space.
Conducted during an artist’s residence in Gaspésie, La laisse explores the notions of time and space by combining a documentation of the waves and residues left by the tides: la laisse. Following these lines in a daily quest, Anne-Renée Hotte pursues her work created with a desire to capture the temporal markers of these visible traces on the shore. She travels long distances along the sea, documenting the phenomenon by hundreds of images taken at irregular intervals. She then assembles them, creating extremely lengthy photographs echoing a timeline infinitely extended. Impossible to grasp in their entirety, the prints measure up to150 feet and are presented partially unrolled, letting the photography become a sculptural object, only fragmentally visible. The work remains essentially concealed to our eyes, thus the photograph becomes an object where the marks of time form the visual imprint of a very precise moment, a witness to what is hidden from view, subtly intertwining images, places and temporalities.
Presented in loop, the video piece reveals a superposition of images of waves in motion captured daily during the artist’s residence. As the subtle variations in the images accumulates, the work becomes abstract, like a palimpsest questioning our perception of time.
Oscillating between movement and fixity, our gaze is continually thwarted by the different visual and spatiotemporal strategies the artist implemented, mobilizing the viewer’s perception in a universe of transparencies and slowness.
Anne-Renée Hotte lives and works in Montreal. A graduate in photography at Concordia University (2010), she completed her master’s degree in visual and media arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2015. Her work has been presented in several locations abroad and in Quebec, including the Galerie Artem (Quimper, France), the Gallery of the University of Indonesia (Jakarta), Volta NY (New York, United States), Caravansérail (Rimouski), the FOFA Gallery (Montreal) and the Galerie Trois Points (Montréal). In 2013, she created a public artwork for the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal, which will be exhibited throughout the construction of the new center. Her work is part of several private collections and of corporates such as the Cirque du Soleil collection and the Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP (Blakes) collection.