MTL | QC | BXL : Cycles
Photographs by Marianne Charland
The forth excerpt from this project MTL | QC | BXL, the series Cycles, invites the viewer to closely examine the city. To discover through the frame, these compositions and locations superimposed with both presence and absence.
Hall
Scène Financière Sun Life
The series MTL|QC|BXL : Croisées (Brussels, 2010, Victoriaville and Montréal, 2011) dwells on urban landscapes and intersections, focusing on encounters of histories lost between time and space. Created in the same stride, Faces (Montréal and Victoriaville, 2011) depicts five portraits of the cityscape. These images contain familiar expressions, which speak of urban genetics and living spaces. With Décor de défense (Victoriaville, 2011) the military’s past has out-dated the three cities, which are now facing modernity on the border of the irrelevant and the historical.
Alongside Croisées, Lieux communs (Brussels, 2010) provided a parallel vision of Québec and Montréal by creating a simultaneous presence in the two cities, resulting in a confusion of the senses. Cycles illustrates, for its part, the succession of eras, which overlap and collide through growth and stagnation, evoking a force and vulnerability to humankind, nature and materials.
In 2008 the first collection by the artist, Winter Eclipse (and other Apocalypses), presented a series of gloomy black and white photographs of Paris cloaked in a palette of gray tones. In 2009, her exhibition, A Photographic Ode to Limoilou presented a particular visionary attachment to this area of Québec. With the project MTL | QC | BXL, she continues working with her favourite theme: the city.
Biography
For the past three years, Marianne Charland has been perusing the creation of a project that links the cities of Montréal, to Québec and to Brussels. The work was originally initiated through the support of LOJIQ - Les Offices Jeunesse Internationaux du Québec. From this grand, evolving construction, emerges a truly unique socio-historical inventory through images: MTL | QC | BXL. A publication will eventually be available to present this artistic, documentary exploration in its entirety.
Photographer and currently studying Urban Heritage in Montréal, Marianne Charland has been practicing photography for more than 10 years. Her work documents the memories of the city, which by being frozen on film, carefully perpetuate a cult photographic technique. She prefers to work with black and white film because of its ability to simplify the complexities of our environment; often oversaturated with colors and lights. Thus bringing to life a simple human vision of the cityscape.
If certain photographers linger on the physical characteristics of people, she is more likely to find inspiration in the way humans have organised their universe. In this spirit, the traces of human life, which reside in both urban and rural landscapes, are clearly established in a recurring theme through these photographic explorations. Her work portrays an essence of these spaces and encounters between man and material, leaving the feelings of first impressions as a path for interpretation. Through the instantaneous materialization of moments and decors, she seizes the ghosts of realities and perceptions long past, in a quest for an underlying meaning in the heart of the city.
