As Montreal vibrates with Momenta | Biennale de l’image – formerly Mois de la photo –Galerie Trois Points is proud to be part of this important artistic manifestation. We are thrilled to present Natascha Niederstrass’ new body of work titled Le point aveugle, taking place from September 9 to October 28.

Loosely inspired by Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘optical unconscious’, Niederstrass explores how our eye and the camera comprehend time and space in widely distinctive ways. Building on this gap in perception, the artist offers the viewer a photographically manipulated reality aiming to let the eye become aware of its own unconscious work.

With this new exhibition, Niederstrass focuses on how our gaze spontaneously seeks traces of invisible worlds in images, in search for references that might belong in the spiritual realm. Thus, Recoleta Cemetary was offered to her as a great starting point for the developement of this new body of works. The photographs presented in Le point aveugle aim to preserve as much as they transform. Produced in Argentina using silver film, the artist then digitized the photograph’s negatives and digitally post-processed the images. Niederstrass hence questions Benjamin’s intuition as she tries to make visible what our perception first makes invisible.

Highly aware of the exhibition physical context, Niederstrass’ new work also invest the gallery space with an installative perpsective that reflects on the cultural and symbolic form of how archives are constructed. Intertwining photographs and sculptural objects presented as carefully preserved heritage, Niederstrass aims to confront the viewer to the idea of how memory is a construction. The artist thus questions the museum practices relating to the idea of archives, its materials, its principles and its cultural symbolic effects, furthuring her research on our relationship to history, information and historical evidence.

Natascha Niederstrass holds a Bachelor’s degree from Concordia University (BFA) and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from York University in Toronto (MFA). Her work has been presented in various solo and group exhibitions. Awarded the Plein sud grant in 2005, she also took part in 2009 in Confluence, jointly presented at the Musée régional de Rimouski and Maison de la culture Frontenac, as part of the event De l’île à la mer, curated by Bernard Lamarche In 2010, she participated in the Off Manif d’Art 5 in Quebec entitled Accident. We have presented her work in a first solo exhibition in 2014 and the same year, she shown at Occurence – Espace d’Art et d’essai contemporain. She had an important exhibition at Gallery 101 in Ottawa during the summer of 2015 that she will be presenting again at CIRCA in January 2018.

Press release

Exhibition Press