Du sommeil et de l’eau

“As an outsider (from France, living in Canada for five years) my position has led me to apprehend this country as one where the natural and the cultural form a strange duality. While most of Canada remains a huge expanse of land where nature is overwhelmingly present, I have chosen as a subject for my work to describe certain specific situations where contact between humans and nature has (or had) finally occurred. In Halifax, four years ago, I focused on the world off shipbuilding and attempted to depict the shipyard as a site where human ritual is performed in relation to the sea. And then this past year in Banff I dwelt upon the odd tourism that takes place in the mythic Canadian Rockies, and in particular the phenomenon of the Cave and Basin, a landmark of naturally hot sulphur springs which, for a few pennies has offered generations of intrigued bathers the opportunity to soak and feel slow, heavy and forgetful. My perception of an environment often starts with visiting the local public archives. At the Archives of the Canadian Rockies (in Banff) I consulted many visual records in which encounters with bears, mountain climbing, and hot sulphur springs were recurrent themes. The images Les Domeurs could be traced directly to one archival photograph by Byron Harmon: 5 Men Sleeping in Tent at Consolation Valley, 1910. And in several of my other images many of the bather figures likewise originated as single elements drawn from various archival photos. More recently, from Les Dormeurs, I have developed a series of variations, upon the theme of sleep: heads propped up against pillows, engulfed in heavy blankets, the sleepers drift into a state of anamality, detachment, ‘a small death’.”