Please tell us about the making of the cover image, Backyard.
Every winter, I photograph snow-covered landscapes in the suburbs and countryside of Quebec. People are naturally suspicious when they see me taking photos of their house or their neighbours’. During the long exposure of this particular photograph, the woman who lives in the house opened the door to question me from her porch. After I tried to explain, she went back inside her house and turned all the lights off. Funnily, it actually helped the making of the image, because I continued exposing the scene without the artificial lights. Luckily, the film didn’t even register her presence and the movement of the door, because our interaction was a short fraction of the total exposure.
What are you working on now?
I just finished a three-month artist residency in Berlin, where I worked with vernacular photographs that belonged to a remote great-aunt of mine named Madeleine. The glossy snapshots document her daily life with her white Persian cats in her apartment. Even though I never met her, I felt an instant connection with this fascinating character who wore pink tracksuits, drank Canada Dry, and smoked cigarettes in her apartment like there was no tomorrow. I presented this eerie collection in two exhibitions, and the next step would be working on a book.
I am also doing research about a famous Quebecois criminal that my grandfather — who used to be a police inspector — told me about. The man coordinated a spectacular bank robbery in Montreal in the fifties and disappeared with the loot for a couple of years until he was found on his Florida yatch. I plan on starting to shoot for this project very soon.
Do you practice any other forms of art besides photography?
I have enjoyed drawing since I was a child, but I have been doing it a lot less since I got serious with my photographic practice. I recently took a ceramics class, where I learned wheel throwing, which I am very bad at, but I have been enjoying the process. Sometimes, I pick up old furniture that people are throwing away, and I restore them in my parent’s garage. By “restore,” I mean painting funky stuff on them. Most of them end up back at the curb, but at least I had a good time.
Name some influences on your work from mediums other than photography.
I find inspiration for subject matters through different forms of storytelling like urban legends, news stories, and investigative journalism, to name a few. The aesthetics of my work are informed by video and computer games environments, especially games based on first-person exploration. I was very moved by the atmosphere in Everybody’s gone to the rapture, which is set in a small English town whose inhabitants have mysteriously vanished. I have an interest in creators who chose to invent fictional towns in existing territories as sets for their stories, like Castel Rock, Maine (Stephen King), or Sunnydale, California (Joss Whedon).
What are some recurring concepts in your work?
The relationship between fact and fiction is a concept that is present in my work, at different extents. I study narrative devices that are used in storytelling. A trope that I explore regularly is “the town with a dark secret.” I have an attraction for unresolved investigations, questions left unanswered. The notion of decay, either in nature or in man-made environments, is also at stake in different bodies of work, like in Double Feature, which combines images of mushrooms at night with a photographic documentation of a soon-to-be demolished cinema in the town where I grew up.
Every winter, I photograph snow-covered landscapes in the suburbs and countryside of Quebec. People are naturally suspicious when they see me taking photos of their house or their neighbours’. During the long exposure of this particular photograph, the woman who lives in the house opened the door to question me from her porch. After I tried to explain, she went back inside her house and turned all the lights off. Funnily, it actually helped the making of the image, because I continued exposing the scene without the artificial lights. Luckily, the film didn’t even register her presence and the movement of the door, because our interaction was a short fraction of the total exposure.
What are you working on now?
I just finished a three-month artist residency in Berlin, where I worked with vernacular photographs that belonged to a remote great-aunt of mine named Madeleine. The glossy snapshots document her daily life with her white Persian cats in her apartment. Even though I never met her, I felt an instant connection with this fascinating character who wore pink tracksuits, drank Canada Dry, and smoked cigarettes in her apartment like there was no tomorrow. I presented this eerie collection in two exhibitions, and the next step would be working on a book.
I am also doing research about a famous Quebecois criminal that my grandfather — who used to be a police inspector — told me about. The man coordinated a spectacular bank robbery in Montreal in the fifties and disappeared with the loot for a couple of years until he was found on his Florida yatch. I plan on starting to shoot for this project very soon.
Do you practice any other forms of art besides photography?
I have enjoyed drawing since I was a child, but I have been doing it a lot less since I got serious with my photographic practice. I recently took a ceramics class, where I learned wheel throwing, which I am very bad at, but I have been enjoying the process. Sometimes, I pick up old furniture that people are throwing away, and I restore them in my parent’s garage. By “restore,” I mean painting funky stuff on them. Most of them end up back at the curb, but at least I had a good time.
Name some influences on your work from mediums other than photography.
I find inspiration for subject matters through different forms of storytelling like urban legends, news stories, and investigative journalism, to name a few. The aesthetics of my work are informed by video and computer games environments, especially games based on first-person exploration. I was very moved by the atmosphere in Everybody’s gone to the rapture, which is set in a small English town whose inhabitants have mysteriously vanished. I have an interest in creators who chose to invent fictional towns in existing territories as sets for their stories, like Castel Rock, Maine (Stephen King), or Sunnydale, California (Joss Whedon).
What are some recurring concepts in your work?
The relationship between fact and fiction is a concept that is present in my work, at different extents. I study narrative devices that are used in storytelling. A trope that I explore regularly is “the town with a dark secret.” I have an attraction for unresolved investigations, questions left unanswered. The notion of decay, either in nature or in man-made environments, is also at stake in different bodies of work, like in Double Feature, which combines images of mushrooms at night with a photographic documentation of a soon-to-be demolished cinema in the town where I grew up.