 |
 |
 |
The color photographs of Canadian artist Élène Tremblay's Alleyways project make up Miller/Geisler Gallery's [511 GALLERY] October exhibition. Twelve large c-prints explore objects, and in one instance a person, inhabiting (or left in) the alleys of Montreal.
A member of the board of the French-Canadian photo collective Vox, Tremblay in her work has continued to focus on a particular way of seeing and viewing the contemporary landscape. Never purporting to represent a complete picture of anything (or anyone), but rather the existing traces of a site or scene, the photographer emphasizes the relationship between the corporal presence of the scene's subject and the body of the viewer/photographer. In part because of their enormous size and strongly saturated color, and in part because of Tremblay's selection of content (a chair, a mattress, a sleeping bag), these objects of the alleyways nearly eclipse the distancing lens of the camera. Like Serrano's "Nomads" series, these portraits-of-a-type remove (through selection) the sitters from their sites or landscapes, while simultaneously capturing some piece of the landscape by means of a human reference to it.
In his essay, "Two Landscapes," the photographer Robert Adams wrote: "At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we." Alleyways transports what stands in front of Tremblay's camera into the contemporary clean and white exhibition space, while carrying along the gaze of the viewer into the space of the alleyway.
