Manipulations

Two photos-imgages, showing ordinary even banal pictures... Yet, the dichotomy comes through: they are twinned by side or on opposite sides, getting to a new artistic language within a special aesthetic frame. A "simulated" reality is created through merging and various other processes, combining artificial and virtual manipulation.

Playing slightly on the abstract, the collages manage to replicate a laboratory, a place of business a pond of nostalgia. But they never cease to remind us that, more and more, we are manipulated by genetic applications and computer practices.

Thanks to the magic of digital synthesis, a single image emerges, a blend of fact and fiction, hope and despair, intertwined in a tensio-active relationship bound to have an emotional impact on the viewer.

While the pictures are shot in familiar, often easily recognizable locations (in this case, Montreal), they preserve a global flavour. The plants could be growing in any botanical garden, anywhere in the world, just as the buildings could easily be laboratories. Occasionally, specific architectural complexes appear, for example, the tower of Montreal's Olympic Stadium.

A sense of irony pervades the pieces, light yet piercing, as it challenges some facets of research and genetic applications: plant manipulation, sequencing, cloning, and so on.