LES HEURES D'ARGENT, TROIS ILLUMINATIONS
An exhibition of Suzan Vachon
The exhibition runs from September 7 to October 8, 2000
Repos et vertige - À la lumière diluvienne - Aux terribles soirs d'étude.
Arthur Rimbaud, Mouvement
Suzan Vachon is an interdisciplinary artist who interrogates certain relations and overlaps between sculpture and video,
film, literature and photography, thus creating works liberated from their traditional limits. As seen recently in exhibitions, international events or integration of arts in architecture projects,
her work shows a marked interest in the staging of light. At the beginning of her research for Les Heures d’argent, trois illuminations, there were fragments of texts from Rimbaud’s Illuminations
whose poetic structure — a splendid fragmented discourse — aroused in the artist analogies with the elliptic aspect of video editing. An amazing space of reference and an eminently modern
literary work, the Illuminations have generated a network of images that first appealed to the artist to become essential in her research — an attempt to expand the contingencies of the image,
to open its form as well as its meaning.
... I have tried to make an installation of the conditions in which sudden images appear, to interrogate oscillatory phenomena such as presence, disappearance, reappearance, and to represent
them in a luminous way. Thus, the research consists in revealing in each sequence incredible light situations which, as suggested by the title, sometimes depend on atmospheric accidents. Each sequence,
as if it were an "illumination", will reflect light as a phenomenon. Among these, let us mention mirage, scintillation, dazzle and radiance – manifestations with a halo.
Moreover, concerned by certain borderline states of the image movement, I use various syntactical devices that act as a magnifying glass for time, exaggerating its speed and swinging it over in
the space of impression instead of expression.
Finally, the selected poetic fragments introduce words that create acoustic sparkles within the space and tension with the image. They do not only increase the semantic potential of the image but
also, and hopefully, add starlight to it.
Suzan Vachon