Opening : Friday September 7, 2012, at 5pm
Guest curator : Elia Eliev
This exhibition entitled Arti/fiction Realities features a selection of Anyse Ducharme’s recent artistic production over the past few years. Situated in the field of new media and digital technologies, Ducharme’s photographic work critically examines the notion of simulated realities (simulacrum)1 in relation to the use of the social media landscape and content web-communities (e.g. YouTube). Her interest lies on the complex relationships between technology and culture, subsequently, questioning the impact of social media technologies on our quotidian experience of life. The artist captures the continuous shifts of information uploaded and the fictional moments in various online social medias.
In her work, The Quality or State of Being Real, Ducharme de/codes her snapshot images towards abstraction. By the means of computer-generated editors, Ducharme digitally manipulates and corrupts the original (.RAW) image format taken from users’ comments on Youtube’s most watched videos. Shaped by various categorical colors and patterns, the resulting unidimensional images allude to an “arti/fictional” reality – an interweaving of artificial and fictional archetypes of ephemeral moments – that are voided in a recontextualized space.
Her second series, voy(eur)age, depicts the experience of the artist as a web traveler/teleporter.2 Using Google Earth, she documents a selection of random moments in time of thirty countries around the world. Due to privacy laws, Google Earth attempts (but rarely succeeds) at blurring out most of the pedestrians’ face and name brands photographed. For Ducharme, these snapshots function as fragments of her personal fictional memories.
—Elia Eliev, curator
[1] Baudrillard, Jean. (1981). Simulacres et Simulation. Paris: Galilée.
[2] Ducharme, Anyse. (2010). Artist Statement.
Sponsor
Anyse Ducharme
Anyse Ducharme is a Franco-Ontarian media artist from Northeastern Ontario (Sturgeon Falls). Her artistic practice is engaged with the circulation of digital imagery and the malleability of data. Her work has been exhibited in Sudbury during FAAS 6, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Middlesbrough, Boston and New York. Ducharme holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia, a BFA from the University of Ottawa, and a college diploma in 3D Animation from La Cité collégiale. She currently works as the Artistic Programmer at Knot Project Space — SAW Video, and sits on the board of directors of both La Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario and the Media Art Network of Ontario.
Artist Profile