Jocelyn Philibert

September 7th - October 26th 2011

Reception: Friday September 9th, 6pm-10pm, 2011

"At night, my camera takes picture blindly and becomes like the eye of a robot. All we need to do is to scan the space by taking several pictures like if, to see, I would need to close my eyes, get away, not to frame or discriminate. Try objectivation. The process can be described with a vocabulary nearly judicial: camera as an instrument of investigation, exploration of sites, searching, meticulous examination, reconstitution, revelation, "world of darkness". My point of view is the following: during the day, the sun would hide as much as it would reveal; at night, I take images out of obscurity. In fact, each image is built on a computer screen and becomes a "discovery" that moves me each and every time (such as the archeologist that discovers something unknown). The nocturne atmosphere, the raw light of the flash, the effects of perspective create a climate of strangeness and mystery; everything seems both real and unreal, natural and artificial. It is this tension between reality and fiction that I find interesting. Sometimes, I happen to think that I am painting with photography. Right now, I am fascinated by the painting of landscapes, the one of the pre-impressionism era, for example when painters seemed to be obsessed by painting the "truth" by imitating nature with studied perspectives, dramatic stagecrafts, huge trees, luxuriant vegetation, magnificient skies, tormented seas, etc. It was like a fight against reality. We cannot say that what we see is real but we cannot say it is unreal either. This is also part of my questioning. This way, I have been invited last summer to participate in the exhibition Natural Forms in Regina (curator and artist JG Hampton) where we were questioning our links with nature, our ever-renewed will to control it and to create "genuine" natural settings."

Jocelyn Philibert

Jocelyn Philibert lives and works in Montréal. He studied communications at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Recipient of many scholarships from the Canada Council for the Arts and from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, his work has been exposed in 2010 at the York University of Toronto, at ARTsPLACE (Annapolis Royal, NS) and at Neutral Ground (Regina, SK). He exposed his work at the Galerie Clark, the Centre d’exposition Circa, L’Œil de Poisson, VU and the Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton and has done residencies at the Chambre blanche, at the Centre Est-Nord-Est and at Sagamie (Alma).