Josée Pedneault (Canada) – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

Josée Pedneault

born in Québec, Canada, Josée Pedneaut lives and works in Montréal. In 2001, she completed a BFA in visual arts at Laval University in Québec city. In 2005, she completed with honors an MFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University with Genevi?ve Cadieux as her thesis adviser. During her academic years, she has studied in United States, France and Greece. In 2006, she will be participating in two artist-in-residence programs of three months each: the first one at the Center for Contemporary Art Unjazdowski Castle in Poland and the second at École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie at Arles, in France. Her artistic projects are supported by the FQRSC, the CIAM and the Canada Council for the Arts.

• Le désordre des jours

  • In the multimedia installation called Le désordre des jours, photographs, videos and sounds transport the viewer on an unexpected journey. The installation uses a computer program, which selects at random the length of time and sequence of the images and sound. The viewer is presented an ever-changing work with no beginning or end. A poetic fiction, or an existentialist reading, comes out of this experience where the memory of the viewer is juxtaposed to the reality of the installation.

  • The beauty of the imperfections, of fleeting moments and of the fragmentary; fireworks, movements of clouds, a snail floating in an aquarium and self-portraits. Banal scenes from daily life take a whole other aspect and evoke universal notions of life, death and time.

  • No image by itself contains the complexity of nuances that emerges of the group. Consequently, an essential element of this work resides in the powers of evocation and association of images, in what emerges from their proximity and their echoes on memory. Le désordre des jours invites the viewer to a dialogue, soliciting his imagination, tastes and sensitivity.

  • Randomness plays a key role in this installation. It reinvents continuously the path and rhythm of the work and offers an almost unlimited grouping of images. Photographs, video and sound, when worked together, bring different levels of information, which nourish the poetic resonance of the work. In addition, because a computer chooses the images at random, this installation suggests a more fundamental questioning on authorship and finality in visual arts.

  • My artistic practice is articulated around poetic propositions - often presented as installations- created from a great quantity of images, photographs, animations, videos and sounds. I am interested in the powers of evocation and association of images, in what emerges from their proximity and their echoes on memory. Essentially, I create environments where the viewer is surrounded by images, whether they are printed or projected. These spaces engage the viewer in an analysis and a personal understanding of the relation between the images, video and sounds. Therefore, my installations are an invitation to a journey, a space of wandering, where the viewer's sensitivity, referents and memory are juxtaposed to the reality of the images. In the end, this fortuitous game of coincidences underlies an existentialist interpretation. This process, by definition malleable, is constantly subject to renew itself, both in its content and its form of presentation (installation, artist's book, photograph, net art).

  • www.fromwarsawwithlove.com

• Curator

  • Ika Sienkiewicz-Nowacka