Anne-Renée Hotte pursues her research combining video, photography and installation in Natural Gesture, her latest project which will be presented at Galerie Trois Points from March 10 to April 21.
This most recent work focuses on several forms of links in which speech is absent and leaves room for dialogue between bodies. By isolating socially coded gestures, Anne-Renée Hotte explores in a video corpus the notion of collective and intimate behavior through nonverbal language. By an absence of narration, the artist transports us closer to this relationship to the other, on the edge of this friction in social and intimate sphere. Whether performative in a sporting practice, about love in a kiss, or care of the other, the artist apprehends each gesture in a way that is both frontal and sensitive.
As a counterpoint, Hotte intertwines her videos with large black and white photographic images of flowers and vegetation. With these flash shots taken in the middle of the night, Hotte develops an arbitrary and haphazard look that gives shape to blind images. The flash light reveals a chaotic but strangely familiar nature, isolating flower beds captured during nocturnal wanderings in public gardens. Like the filmed gestures, here the one of the photograph is stripped as deprived of the artist’s gaze by the darkness of the night.
Through this photographic choice, the artist seeks to reveal the non-visible. On one side, there is an absence of a link between the seen and the voyeur in still images, and on the other, bodies in motion that speak to each other without voice. As the contact with the body of the other tends to decrease in favor of a communication via screen, Anne-Renée Hotte manages to approach the intimate under a multiplicity of forms and textures.
A graduate in photography at Concordia University (2010), Anne-Renée Hotte 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 was exhibited throughout the construction of the new center.