Chronicles of the Ephemeal
Chronicles of the Ephemeral brings together ten photographs and as many short stories drawn from everyday life. Like a Polaroid, each chronicle captures a moment of existence and delivers it in the form of a photograph and a text. These testimonies of ephemeral moments are gathered to form the signature of a book printed specially for the event.
The exhibition presents the separated elements of this signature: pages, photographs, text, and cover. The book ceases to render the narrative in a structured order and becomes a fragmented world to be grasped, deciphered, and inhabited.
This fragmentation reflects the way we make sense of our experience. The world does not reach us in an orderly fashion. We connect events, encounters, and perceptions to give them an intelligible form and draw a narrative from them. The fragmentary creations gathered for the exhibition become not the pieces of a puzzle to be reassembled, but the starting point of an interpretation of the world.
Fragments of a World
« J’aimais à penser que la lumière réfléchie par tous ces petits moments quotidiens s’alignent peu à peu sur ma pellicule. Lorsque je regarde rétrospectivement les photos ainsi glanées, il me semble qu’elles ont été davantage acquises par un collectionneur que par un chasseur d’images. »
« Les images montent en désordre. Ce souvenir incertain émerge des profondeurs d’une mémoire voilée. Pour masquer mon trouble, je prends spontanément mon appareil photo et garde le plus longtemps possible mon œil contre le viseur. »
« Nous sommes les personnages issus d’une pièce inédite de Tcheckhov. Le petit jardin dans lequel nous nous trouvons n’est déjà plus le même. Il ne sera jamais plus le même. »
« Je profite de ce séjour dans le Bas-du-Fleuve pour retrouver la trace de Stanislas Belle, un de mes photographes préférés. Je sais qu’il a vécu ici à la fin du XIXe siècle. Il se serait établi sur la rue Lafontaine en 1894 puis, en 1095, il a fait construire un studio de l’autre côté de la rue, à l’angle de la rue Amyot. »
« Mahalia Jackson interprétait Silent Night avec une intensité proche de la transe, des rires provenaient de la cuisine d’où s’échappait une odeur appétissante de tourtière, des flocons par milliards quittaient nonchalamment le ciselet transformaient le sol en un paysage d’une douceur absolue. J’ai chargé mon F3 d’un film Kodak Tri-X et je me suis mis en quête d’une première victime. »
« Si cette photographie était celle d’un avant et que je devais en prendre une autre aujourd’hui pour un après, on pourrait y voir un tout autre homme et un tout autre décor. »
Works in Detail
Pages
Chroniques de l'éphémère plays with the signature of a book, shown only in part. The forty pages of this signature are exhibited in pairs. Because they are fixed to the wall, only their recto is accessible: the verso pages can be sensed only through the transparency of the paper. Half of the content thus escapes us, and the accessible pages no longer appear in reading order. This stems from traditional printing, where the page layout depends on the binding: before being exhibited, the folded sheets were nested inside one another to establish the reading sequence, a sequence that their transformation into an art object erases, giving way to another experience.
Photographs
Chroniques de l'éphémère exhibits the ten photographs drawn from the signature, each linked to a moment of life at the origin of a chronicle. In the book, the photograph enters into dialogue with the accompanying text which, like a caption, recounts the events that prompted the image and fixes its meaning. Detached from the book and presented as a fine-art print, the same photograph loses this anchoring; it opens to every interpretation and at once establishes itself as an art object in its own right.
Installation
Continuing the presentation of the elements of the dismantled book, the exhibition offers an installation of about a hundred book covers pinned to the wall like a butterfly collection. Arranged in rows, they suggest an immense library whose volumes have been emptied of their pages: instead of aligned spines, the gaze meets the bare interior of the bindings. This Bibliothèque des mots disparus does more than bear witness to the shell of the book taken apart: it becomes the trace of an absent content, whether narrative, thought, knowledge, or memory, whose presence it retains.
Serie: 10 works
Titles: XXI to XXX
Dimensions: 24 x 33 cm
Edition: 4 to 6 copies
Pigment print on Harman Gloss FB AI baryta paper, 350 g/m²
Dimensions: 20 x 26 cm
Edition: 21 copies
Ink on Domtar Feltweave opal white paper, 70 lb
Space: 3 x 3,5 meters
Bibliotheca Verborum Dilapsorum. North wing, 7th floor, 3rd row, at the back, on the left
Video
In the exhibition, each element of the signature is presented separately; the video The End gives access to the complete text. For thirty-two minutes, the literary content of the chronicles scrolls across the screen like film credits, punctuated by abstract shots of snow that mark the passage of time. The text is complete this time, but reading it imposes its own constraints: the visitor must stay attentive throughout the screening and follow the scroll in order to miss nothing. Like the other elements of the exhibition, The End makes the whole accessible while keeping it difficult to grasp in its totality. This video makes time a concrete experience rather than an abstraction: like the stories themselves, it can be neither held onto nor replayed at will. It passes, and with it the text it carries.
Series: 10 works
Titles: Pages 82-119, 84-117, etc.
Book covers and nails
Unique piece
The End. Silent video work
Duration: 32 minutes
Edition: 5 copies
Pigment print on Breathing Color Elegance Velvet cotton paper, 300 g/m²
Serie: 10 works
Titles: XXI to XXX
Dimensions: 33 x 48 cm
Edition: 21 copies