Judith Bellavance
in Cap-Chat

Exhibit

NEWS OF HOPE
AND OTHER MICRO-FICTIONS

Rest area | 7 Rue Notre-Dame Est (Route 132) | Cap-Chat
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Judith Bellavance, Montreal, Québec | judithbellavance.com

“In my work both as a painter and as a photographer, it’s the development of a poetic language in ‘micro-fiction’ style that interests me.”

“In both cases I’m driven by the passion of the individual subject as much as by the pleasure of collecting. It was incidentally that passion that led me from painting to photography. Over the years, this detour through photography moved progressively from a series of images to a work in itself. A new register was born of the meeting and the interpenetration of the two disciplines, without their merging, however.

“My creative work stems from a desire to show and to relate all at once. That desire takes shape in the ‘objects’ that I inscribe in a fragmentary relationship, first among themselves and then with the world. In each work I attempt to highlight a relationship of proximity as well as a vision of otherness in order to relate a story in itself. My works are splinters and whispers, open puzzles that install an unresolved narrative tension, the bearer of potential narratives.”

Judith Bellavance

Exhibit at rencontres

NEWS OF HOPE
AND OTHER MICRO-FICTIONS

“By means of photography I can enhance my enjoyment of collecting through the harvesting of images. It is thus that I’ve expanded my repertoire of real objects to two-dimensional objects. I delve into them and favor a viewpoint of proximity in order to address topics that fascinate me, a subjective re-appropriation of a fragment of objective reality to develop what I call a ‘grammar of the intimate.’ That grammar takes the form of ‘micro-fictions’ open at one and the same time to the ordinary and to desire.

“At first I approach and work on photographic subjects in close-up with a strong commitment, in the first place, to cataloguing and to revealing all the particularity and complexity of their details. My aim is to take advantage of the evidence of these representations to accentuate what they have to communicate to us, by which I mean the emotional and poetic charge of their connotations, the ambiguity and dissonances they harbor.

“Then, a pairing operation, a kind of rerouting, enables me to express a certain vision of otherness, conceived the way a fiction endlessly in draft stage would be. In other words, I propose a sort of balance in disparity so that these uncertain tandems can deliver their potential for dialogue, creating a temporality conducive to the telling of a tale and an open narrative program, woven of itineraries and stories of varying geometry.

“I’m devoting myself to developing this grammar of the ordinary and of desire. Investigation sites, these pairings refer to dramatized spaces without explaining the connections. I like to think that these works could appear in the manner of pre-images, with what’s at stake being linked to the states, sensations and moments when the image looms up and impresses itself on our senses before it imprints itself on the consciousness and finds a meaning there. Through this ‘scripting of the intimate’ I hope to steer the eye into a drifting movement where subjectivity comes into play, where the interpretations that result from it make for an experience where the ordinary and desire combine.”

Judith Bellavance