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Where is the internet? How does the so-called “cloud” physically exist within the landscape? An impossible index of clouds is an in-progress research project - in the forms of prints, books and video collages - in which I investigate these questions and wanderings. Through tactile and bendable visual poems on screen, on paper and on fabric, I reflect on the myth that the internet is lightweight and intangible and look at its complex, often hidden physical ramifications.

I am also compelled by the question(s) of what a book can be and what happens when a book becomes an object in hand, a thing felt and touched and is put in conjunction with familiar screen-based daily practices and/or is recompressed as videos or prints.

I made a first book in two parts (blue and green, clouds and farms) exploring these questions during a residency at the Institute for Electronic Arts. The book is 104 pages, printed on Xuan paper, in an edition of 2, shared here in a 6 minutes 31 seconds video.

For the video series Éparpillements, I use video as the glue or binding agent for the pages of a metaphorical book. The act of turning the pages becomes a performance view from above through a drone-camera, an inverted map of sort. Images of sky are moved around piercing the ground, creating little windows, similar to the multiple windows opened on my screen at the moment.

Another aspect I explore through this research project is the act of gardening, coupled with the nomenclature surrounding digital spaces (with words such as cloud, window, mouse, scrolling, (server) farms). I am grateful to have had the privilege to start a garden as a way to cope with the increased need for screen time in the past years. I have gathered documentation and notes from that process that I use as material to create small format booklets of collages. I juxtapose my garden beds with the overlapped opened windows on my computer, to contrast with these mega server farms and to delve into micro-intimate-farming and zine making instead.

A selection of these pieces have been shown in exhibitions at Buffalo Arts Studio, CVA Gallery at Kent State University, and Richard & Dolly Maass Gallery at Purchase College.

This is a 60-minute long single channel video to be screened in a theater setting, viewed on a computer screen, or experienced in an installation against blue walls.

This film has a companion book Les attentes . Table Book

It’s practical to work on a project about waiting, as you can always say that it will take a long time to finish it. The results are latent, time passing is an intrinsic part of the project. In addition, when you say that you are working on a book and a film, there is an assumption that these things take a lot of time to make anyways.

This video piece stems from a long-term research project on waiting and waiting rooms and takes the forms of desktop performance, contemplative collages, and meditations on time passing. Combining short stories, interviews, reconstructed environments, landscapes, objects, and visual poems, I play with four typical waiting room ingredients, which become chapters: 1) screens, 2) chairs, 3) green plants, and 4) time. When presented in an installation, it loops back every hour - acting as a clock in the gallery space.

The core (or one of the cores) of this project is to celebrate non-productive moments made of hesitation, latency, nothing, possible disconnection, escape, inattention, drift, stillness, uncertainty, privilege. To do nothing, to stop, to be bored in order to start to observe with a new attention, to slow down, to learn. 

This project would not have been possible without the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the University of Rochester. Portions of this video were produced during residencies at La Cité internationale des Arts, 3331 Arts Chiyoda and SÍM. It was installed at Buffalo Arts Studio in a solo exhibition.

Full video available to stream on request.

Order here! Commande ici !

Printed & bound at Publication Studio Hudson in Troy, New York.

What is a waiting room? One chair, or two, or many. Or maybe only a piece of tape on the floor, to mark where the waiting begins. There, we are waiting for something. For a train to arrive, for a number to appear on a screen, for our name to be called, for a dear friend to meet us. We are suspending ourselves in time and in space.

Les attentes ⋅ Table Book is a bilingual French–English 438-page book-object printed and numbered in an edition of 100 copies. It contains texts and photographic images collected over a long period of time. To be read while waiting, to be placed on a side table, or on a shelf, by a chair, or perhaps near a potted plant. Created in the context of a long-term investigation on waiting rooms. This book has a companion 60-minute film titled Les échéances ⋅ As the hour turns blue.

This project would not have been possible without the support of La cité internationale des arts, 3331 art residency, Ramdom, SIM Art Residency, the University of Rochester, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

ISBN 978-1-62462-192-5
List price: US$35

Available at the following bookstores:
Printed Matter (NYC)
Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester)
Art Metropole (Toronto)
N'était-ce pas l'été (Montréal)
Liber (New Richmond)

Work-in-progress. A collection of works on paper, photographs, collages, texts and videos weaving together reflections about slowness and urgency, strange coincidences, physical distances, screens, trees, connectivity, and storytelling.

onlythesky.space

We think of the sky as an infinite open space. This perspective shifts when the sky is the only thing one can see from the outside, when it becomes a tangible surface, another wall.

The windows of an empty theater and a newspaper become the frames for photographic images of sky embeded with commissioned texts by people affected by incarceration. The texts were written in response to 33 photographs of sky. These images were taken on Google Street View above or around a jail, prison or detention center within a radius of two-hour drive of Rochester, NY. The viewfinder is looking above the buildings to collect fragmented inverted maps of these locations.

This project culminated in an interactive website, a 6-month public installation at the vacant Monroe Theater (585 Monroe Ave, Rochester NY, 14604), a series of flags, a one-day symposium and newspaper prints using the motif of sky to talk about transparency, incarceration and public spaces.

Through photographic and written collaboration, I aspire to portray two specific settings: spaces that one cannot physically leave and spaces that one cannot physically access. After having carefully read hundreds of online profiles of persons looking for pen pals, I have started to correspond with a group of people serving life sentences in American prisons. In my introduction letter, I asked them if they were interested in collaborating with me via mail correspondence to create a series of images together through specific questions: the descriptions of the spaces in which they live and those they are longing for and dreaming about.

The book Wall+Paper is a collection of these exchanges on paper. By weaving together curated fragments of the letters received and the images sent, multiple voices emerge to form micro-conversations between all participants. Drawing a poetical statement and/or a map of these ambiguous institutional spaces, this project is not an attempt to ‘break’ the thick wall of the prison nor to depict the disturbing American mass incarceration statistics, it is rather an attempt to trigger curiosity from all sides, to activate spaces that are often invisible or overlooked, and to explore themes of displacement and memory. A number of the photographs I sent to my collaborators were selected from a personal archive of images taken in various locations and time periods–often taken as diaristic note-to-self to remember the strangeness of a site or a situation. Dug out of their hibernation or latent state in hidden numerous digital folders and sub-folders, they are given a metaphorical second life here in echo to my collaborators’ written contributions.

The project was initiated during a three-month residency at Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, NY) in the fall of 2014 and I was awarded a Project Grant to Visual Artists from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2015 to continue developing the project. The book Wall+Paper is published and distributed by Publication Studio Hudson (NY) and was shown in several exhibition venues.

Bookstores
Art Metropole (Toronto, Canada)
Printed Matter, Inc (New York, NY)
Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, NY)

Exhibitions / Conferences / Texts
Dislocations, Collar Works, Troy, NY, USA
Les attentes, VU PHOTO, Quebec City, Canada
Errances imaginaires, VU PHOTO, Quebec City, Canada
Free Translation, MAA-tila, Helsinki, Finland
Prison Outside#2, conference, Helsinki, Finland

Through this project I aspire to portray places of unexpected encounters and discoveries where tension and boredom cohabit: waiting rooms. I investigate their potential to unfold in places of both the everyday and the extraordinary. From doctor's offices to airports, unmarked waiting lines and geographical terrains, I document and examine these spaces—real and/or restaged—as sets for fictional stories inspired by actual events. How do we wait, and how the spaces we are waiting in alter the experience?

The project has taken place in various settings and cultures around the world. Not in an attempt to draw a comparative study or produce a documentary about waiting but rather in an attempt to weave a poetic narrative that illustrates these everyday shared experiences. The production processes are a combination of work on site and reconstructed environment and objects in the studio, involving the creation of ‘fake’ environments inspired by ‘real’ waiting situations. I base my research and play with four typical waiting room elements: 1) seating arrangements, 2) screens (TVs, mobile devices), 3) magazines and or posters to read, and 4) green plants and framed pictures depicting landscapes/wilderness.

I have started the production of the project in 2016 through three art residencies: a two-month stay at La Cité internationale des Arts in Paris (France), another two-month stay at 3331 Arts Chiyoda in Tokyo (Japan), and a four-day stay at Lastation in Gagliano de Capo, the headquarter of the art association Ramdom located above the waiting room of the last train station of the line going to the South East region of Italy.

During these residencies, I set up fictional waiting rooms in my temporary studios and invited people to use them and share with me a waiting story. Some of the stories I recorded relate the waiting to cross a border daily, to see a lover met on the internet, to see a loved one who just died in their hospital’s bed, to see a family member for the first time, the waiting for ideas to manifest, for a response to come. There are impactful waiting moments that can last years and small scale waiting moments that only last seconds. In a culture of instant gratification, the moments of suspension–sometimes contemplative, sometimes filled with frustration–and the spaces carefully designed or makeshift for these collective and intimate states are ever-changing. This aspect is fascinating to me.

I was awarded a Project Grant to Visual Artists (2017) and a Concept to Realization Grant (2022) from the Canada Council for the Arts to complete the project. Part of this research has been presented solo exhibitions at CAMAC Art Center in Marnay-sur-Seine in France in 2017 [the center has since then unfortunately closed its doors] and at VU (Quebec City, Canada) in 2018. Iterations of the project were also included in the exhibition LAND FORM at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY in 2106, a three-person exhibition titled Delayed at Big Orbit, CEPA Gallery Contemporary Photography & Visual Arts Center’s satellite exhibition space in Buffalo (NY). During the fall 2017, I continued to develop the project as a fellow at the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester.

This project is ongoing and has many ramifications:
Les attentes . Table Book
Les échéances . As the hour turns blue
Scrolling
Last Stops
This must be the place
When Chair Swim
Regarder les feuilles tomber
Nonewspaper
Chair arrangements
Fictions
Aux oiseaux

Meditations on waiting and strange places. Installations at Hartnett Gallery at the University of Rochester and in the windows of CVA Gallery at Kent State University.

See project Les attentes for more details.

Initiated in March 2017 in collaboration with a group of incarcerated people at the detention center Villenauxe-la-Grande (France), the project consists of creating a series of fictional photographic doorways. The 6 images were developed during a series of 8 workshops and designed to be printed ‘life size’ and installed permanently in some of the common spaces of the detention center. With instructions taking the form of collages, drawings and mockups, I photographed and digitally constructed the imaginary doors after the workshop sessions. This speculative installation creates a relief (even if very momentary) from the concrete walls of the institution, and a potential way for the multiple users of the space to connect –– a step towards rehabilitation, which is the mission of the project.

Collaborators: Diko, Galère, Dino & Lopes
The project was made possible with the support of Centre d’Art Marnay Art Center (now unfortunately closed) and Le service pénitentiaire d’insertion et de probation.

The sky becomes a wall, the wall becomes a sky. See project Les attentes for more details.

Looped video on iPad. Fragment of a larger exploration on waiting spaces. See project Les attentes for more details.

Co-created with choreographer Chase D. Angier and scenographer Marketa Fantovà, Letter to the World is a sequential multimedia project that has been installed and performed in various locations and settings between 2012 and 2017. The project is a collection of site-specific video installation, live performance pieces and printed pieces. Bringing to light questions regarding sustainability of communities and relationships, the project is a collection of non-linear narratives depicting the memories of fictional characters re-framed with videos, objects, bodies and spaces. The series created over five years has five iterations: a live stage performance; two site-specific installations/performances involving five sculptural wooden cubes containing prints and videos
; and a printed newspaper distributed via mail.

Letter to the World II was a site-specific video installation and performance event in the Elks Lodge in Hornell, New York. Letter to the World III was presented and performed at World Stage Design in Cardiff (UK). For Letter to the World IV, the five boxes (paper, wood, ink and video) were installed in empty rooms directly on the floor for the event Compartmented.

For the speculative last iteration of the series, the audience receive the piece via mail and become the performer. The newspaper format assembles many of the elements we worked with in the previous manifestation of the project: paper, container, time based and intimate viewing, archive and memory.

The project includes performances by Ned Allen, Nkechi-Kiara Megan Chambers, Angelinne Diaz, Ibrahim Osumanu, Eden Palmer, Kimberly Rau, Krystal Redding & Julie Verdone and music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Claudio Monteverdi, Kenny Rogers & Dinah Washington.

Read Amanda Jane Graham’s beautiful essay Fragments for Letter(s) to the World about our piece in ASAP Journal.

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lettertotheworldproject.com

Exhibition curated by Aaron Delehanty at the art space Loud Cow, Spencerport, NY

Installed at the Gleason Library Gallery, University of Rochester, NY for a period of one year. This installation was an exploration of the multiple tangible and philosophical functions of a passageway and consisted of composite images of six impossible rooms. Once adhered on the surface of the walls imaginary extensions were added to the library entrance, triggering a shift of our perception of these spaces. These rooms were digitally built with photographs of architectural elements of various institutional spaces with subtle details and clues evoking traces of a past activity, perhaps a small catastrophe.

Series of video loops exploring the green plants in waiting rooms. Fragment of a larger exploration on waiting spaces. See project Les attentes for more details.

Work-in-progress, satellite research for the project Les attentes, in which I investigate waiting spaces. I visited every last stops on the Tokyo Metro Route Map. Once at the stations, I explored around and looked for meeting areas, benches, and waiting line markers to photograph. This work was produced and exhibited in June 2016 during a residency at AIR3331, a residency program established by the artist-run center 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo (Japan).

Satellite research for the project Les attentes, in which I investigate waiting spaces. Site-Specific installation at 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo (Japan) in June 2016.

Satellite research for the project Les attentes, in which I investigate waiting spaces. 7:00 video loop. The audience becomes perhaps more conscious of their waiting for something to happen while they watch.

Satellite research for the project Les attentes, in which I investigate waiting spaces. I set up fictional waiting spaces in my temporary studio spaces while in residencies in France, Japan and Italy. I asked the participants to wait for several minutes in an imaginary waiting room (my studio) and then to share their observations and stories. Some of the stories I recorded relate the waiting to cross a border daily, to see a lover met on the internet, to see a loved one who just died in their hospital’s bed, to meet a family member for the first time. In these uncertain times provoked by the current pandemic, I am continuing to collect stories about waiting, boredom, anxiety, interconnectedness and how the spaces we occupy are changing––gathering more notes than I wished for.

Thank you to all the participants for sharing their precious stories and time.

Satellite research for the project Les attentes, in which I investigate waiting spaces. Edition of 500 12-page take-away color newspaper prints without text.

Site-specific art happenings that I co-curated with choerographer Missy Pfohl Smith. Seventeen artists occupied ‘The Sunday School’ located in the back of the new venue of the former Lyric Opera Theatre, the fascinating vestiges from the former Christian Scientist Church, in Rochester, New York. Organized in a horseshoe shape, with two rows of 12 small compartmented reading rooms all faced a stage, allowing the audience to see everything at once then zoom in the spaces and explore each compartment, and wander through a unique curiosity cabinet. The experience of navigating and discovering the space itself during the opening nights was as important as experiencing the artists’ interventions, which included dance to video projections, prints, performances, sound and text.

One could see Bentham’s Panopticon, strange biblical reading rooms, a compartmented symmetrical cabaret, fascinating surfaces and corners, rounded walls, hypnotic wallpaper, one could hear the sound of a lost memory, imagine a dress as big as a room, a play of differences and repetitions, the smell and texture of a worn red carpet, typographic wonders of ancient blue prints, a place of worship, or perhaps a surveillance device.

What will you find here?

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Read an article in Rochester City Newspaper.

Featuring work by D. Chase Angier, Roberley Bell, Debora Bernagozzi, Jason Bernagozzi, Laurel Jay Carpenter, Meredith Davenport, Marketa Fantova, Alysia Kaplan, Heather Layton, Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge, Tara Merenda Nelson & Gordon Nelson, Laurie O’Brien, Missy Pfohl Smith , Joshua Thorson, & Allen C. Topolski

Installation for the site-specific event Compartmented consisting of two video projections: one onto frosted glass doors and one framed by a wooden doorway. Playing with surfaces, frames and modes of representation, I composed an aleatory dance for four hands, a photograph of the sky, confetti, paper, and nail polish.

Series of images and short videos developed during a residency at Signal Culture.

During the fall of 2012, with artist Jason Bernagozzi, I co-curated and launched a series of site-specific happenings and exhibitions in downtown Rochester under the name of The City is Asleep and Dreaming. Our goal was to create a public dialogue about the transitioning identity of the city and provoke a re-imagining of what public space is and could be. Blending public engagement, curatorial practices, relational media, performances, collaborations, and issues of site-specificity, the project addressed the thematic and material concerns of the exhibition space(s), and blurred the line between making and curation. We created poetic prints and web media that functioned as clues to the location and intention behind each temporary installation. The largest event in the series was presented at the vacant National Bank in downtown Rochester and included the work of 18 visual, dance and performance artists, each addressing concepts surrounding the act of transformation while operating within a public space that appeared to be frozen in time. More than 400 visitors attended this one-night event.

This project was made possible through the support of Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Visual Studies Workshop, University of Rochester and Alfred State College.

deriveinrochester.tumblr.com

Site-specific video installation for the project The City is Asleep and Dreaming at the National Bank, 35 State St., Rochester, NY.

Outdoor video installation for the project The City is Asleep and Dreaming in collaboration with Rochester Contemporary Art Center.

I was invited for a research residency at Le Magasin Général in May 2015, where I produced Tactiques de Camouflages, a site-specific installation consisting of a large format composite image created for the façade of the former general store. Printed on a 15’ x 16’ weather resistant vinyl, the piece was installed for a one-year period. A video component was projected onto the windows of the building the night of the inauguration. I worked with the architectural elements of the building and the immediate landscape incorporating imaginary spaces into it exploring the multiple levels of transparency a façade can or could provide, and playing with the idea of ‘looking through’ rather than ‘looking at’ the building and its windows. I was awarded a Travel Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for this project. Read an article by Sylvette Babin about the project in esse art + opinions.

Le Magasin Général: studio international en création multidisciplinaire is an art residency center dedicated to the production and the diffusion of multidisciplinary arts. It was founded in December 2014 by artists Jacky Georges Lafargue and Louis Couturier. Located between the beach and the forest on the North shore of the Gaspe Peninsula, in the small village of Rivière-Madeleine, the center occupies a late 19th-century ‘boom town’ style building that was originally the general store of the village.

Installation at Carleton-sur-mer for the exhibition Route 132, Vaste et Vague Artist Center.