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In her new exhibition, Misfortunes, Élène Tremblay shows large-scale color photographs and films of street scenes from Montréal. Where her previous exhibition, Alleyways, examined the spaces that people leave behind, this body of work begins to examine "street-people" and the person (or body) left behind.
In each work, the viewer sees a person in a street scene, but has no sense of the individual. Faces are lost, blurred, or turned away. We are forced to view these individuals as "visitors" view them: as objects that are part of the city landscape. This approach calls into question how human beings can fade into landscape, losing the purpose, significance, status, or individuality that is often attributed to objects. What importance do we attribute to landscape? Is it more than just "there"?
The films depict short, repetitious, and never-ending acts: climbing up a hill, standing in the rain, screaming on a corner. The repetition and seeming pointlessness of the individuals' acts is haunting. Who are they, where are they and why? The viewer is to some extent captured and held hostage by these scenes; yet from the repetition emerges a glimpse of the beauty and power of life in the transformed metropolis of contemporary time.
