Summer 2019
I browse visual archives to tilt them into the imaginary and the felt. By collecting and sampling artifacts and visual textures, I manually transform these concrete sources into a digital platform to give them a new poetic and playful value. Through my curious and contemplative gaze, I create uncluttered visual narratives that weave introspective stories about life.
I am also very interested in community, more specifically the artistic community. I like knowing its actors and to participate either as an artist through my works or as a citizen and contributor in the framework of its engaged projects.
A residency at Artexte seems to be a privileged moment to search through the archives of my community and, through to their paper footprints, make connections with people and places that I have not yet had the chance to encounter in person. It will also be an opportunity to continue investigating themes that are important to me such as the artist’s conditions, public art, popular art, women in the arts and collage.
Taking inspiration from physical documents and their contents, I want to sample Artexte’s collection and rearrange the collected data in a narrative way. To extract these selected samples, I will take a digital footprint of the documents either by photographing them or scanning them. From these images, I want to create a digital slideshow in which I will insert a personal narration that could be written in the document or performed as an artist’s conference.
Caroline Blais is an animation filmmaker and Canadian multidisciplinary artist. Since 2013, her five short films have been screened in more than 40 international festivals and arts centres, including in France, Sweden, Australia, Germany and the United States. After studying cinema and graphic design, she continues to develop her unique visual language through multidisciplinary experimentation. Over the past ten years, she has participated in numerous artistic residencies, socially engaged conferences and in video performances. Her exploratory work has the innate ability to reveal the uncommon side of ordinary things and to treat life’s daily occurrences with compassionate candour. Her most recent film and first narrative animation work. Her playful and intimate look focuses on our relationship to material culture and society.