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Parages / Pane mundial, 2002, impression à jet d’encre archive sur polypropylène, 274 x 1016 cm,© Alain Paiement
Looking back over twenty years and trying to retrace the path of experiments with images, we start in the early 1990s, when a couple of newcomers, Alain Paiement and Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, were already starting to turn heads. In an essay published in 1992, Denis Lessard tried to show what these artists owed to the heritage of Pierre Boogaerts, Bill Vazan, and Serge Tousignant.1 He also mentioned the work, then new, of Raymonde April, Lucie Lefebvre, and Denis Farley. This effort at historical perspective was out of place at the time, when the lion’s share of attention in the critical environment was being paid to the rebirth of installation art and the manner in which photography and, soon, the photographic would be inserted into it. By Jacques Doyon What do the images in a magazine say? What is revealed by the reiteration of certain types of images – as well as their format, positioning, and grouping?
Photographs are central to the definition of magazines, often equal in importance to textual content. For the image, the magazine goes beyond being a space for presentation to being one of enunciation. Far from being limited to an illustrative role, images are a fundamental vector of magazines’ editorial orientation. By Jacques Doyon In this issue, we bring together images testifying to the impacts of accelerated modernization in today’s China. The photographers who made them have varying degrees of professional experience linked to commissions for the media, corporations, or advertising.  In 1967, Jack Chambers of London, Ontario, received a letter from the National Gallery of Canada informing him that its staff was beginning to assemble a bank of two thousand slides on Canadian art and asking for his permission to reproduce the image of one of his works. By Jacques Doyon The image bank is an archive structured by selection, indexing, and thematic cross-referencing procedures that determine how it is used. Artists appropriate this mechanism to explore the issues in visual culture and the contemporary future of the “virtual museum” prefigured by Malraux. By Jacques Doyon Photography is becoming an increasingly important component of private collections. Recognition of the wealth and diversity of the photographic tradition, as well as a significant rise in the value of photographs on the art market, have accompanied this evolution. By Jacques Doyon Photographing the street, over time, to record the evolution of the city and how it is used is a strategy that remains current. In these pages, it reveals the survival of small businesses in the era of globalization of markets, it allows us to follow the radical transformation of a city centre, and it confronts us with the invasive illusion of advertising images that rival reality.  By Jacques Doyon This is the first part of our review of twenty years of Ciel variable. It offers an overview of the metamorphoses that the magazine has had over the years as photographic practices evolved, their field of application broadened, they were increasingly recognized by the art world, and their institutional environment changed. By Jacques Doyon Ciel variable is twenty years old! Over the years, the magazine has undergone several metamorphoses in order to better reflect the evolution in photographic practice, the broadening of its field of application, its recognition by the art world, and changes in its institutional environment. By Jacques Doyon The works presented in this issue form conceptual mappings of territories in the midst of redefinition: the Internet, the natural environment, and circulation hubs. There is no cartography in the literal sense here; rather, these metaphorical mappings use the tools of cartography for investigations and approaches that examine our relationship with these environments and bring up ethical issues. By Jacques Doyon It is not surprising that the world of advertising has become an object of investigation and aesthetic appropriation for contemporary artists. Advertising has an important place in Western culture. It is omnipresent in the urban environment, and it literally inundates the communications media, in which it rivals news, entertainment, and culture. By Jacques Doyon The images brought together in this issue fall under the rubric of the “staged” photography. They are inscribed within a current that has flowed throughout the history of photography, as the exhibition Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre, currently on at the National Gallery of Canada, brilliantly demonstrates. By Jacques Doyon Instructions: define a field of operations that is compatible with the camera’s field, determine the procedures for choosing objects and the type of actions to produce, decide on a duration, insert a body into the recording field, perform the planned manipulations or interactions, and then re-evaluate the results of the shots, select the images, and establish a mode of exhibition, to which you may or may not add the instructions. By Jacques Doyon The optical devices, the renderings of light and perspectives, and the compositional modes inherited from the pictorial tradition form, even today, one of the foundations of our modes of representation, including for media based on the recording of the real and on digitization. By Jacques Doyon In this issue, we feature works that, in their profusion and scope, offer a glimpse at the condition of the world as it is manifested and revealed through the mechanisms for fabrication and circulation of images. These image systems are of different dimensions, ranging from identity as it is defined in proximity and culture, By Jacques Doyon Seeing better, seeing farther; disrupting the representation, dissolving it: these approaches seem contradictory. Yet, paradoxically, they hew to a single frontier: that of the visible and representable, that of the limit of our capacity to see and our perceptual expectations. By Jacques Doyon This issue is about our ways of apprehending, representing, and acting in the contemporary city. The works presented here are all characterized by the inclusion within the images of a multiplicity of points of view and a distinct process of observation. They examine different aspects of an urbanity that is being fundamentally transformed. By Jacques Doyon The works in this issue fall under the sign of things that are beyond comprehension. The list of catastrophic events that have left bitter traces on our democratic ideals in the last half-century is long. Current events dealt with in contemporary visual arts bring to mind some of these unimaginable moments: the shock of September 11, 2001; |
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