As an object of human fascination, even fire cannot rival the image, which hypnotizes, enthralls and subdues. Pervasive in our digital lives, images are spreading at an astonishing pace, to the point that they can sometimes cloud our comprehension and leave us disoriented. What if we could recover our clarity of vision by tearing up the veil thrown over our eyes, going beyond the surface to reclaim the substance of images and restore their aura?
Drawing inspiration from web culture and its visual simulations, along with science fiction and architecture, Sabrina Ratté crafts image-spaces to navigate and cross, in which to embed oneself. She polishes their reflective facets like myriad alternative realities that augment our experience of the here and now. And yet at the same time, we are elsewhere. Her art is that of the alchemist, transforming matter into light, illusion into depth. She melds technologies into a poetic hybrid form with holograms, photography, and 3D animation.
Eleven of her works are presented together for the first time as an experience in this exhibition, and refer both to the images’ halo and an area of spatial metamorphosis. Immense, enveloping, ambiguous. The human element is absent from the colorful projections but reintroduced by visitors—both the stars and supporting cast—who bring their own original, unique perspective to the landscape, which is unveiled as a sculpture with a pearly sheen far superior to the compressed glow of the Internet. Ratté creates an experience for the body in which symbolic boundaries fade away, through a monumental architectural edifice where sounds echo into the distance and shapes extend beyond their three-dimensional frames. A movement through space that relates our relationship with screens, our desire to pass through them to fuse with what they display, and the ever-growing distance that separates us from that world closed off behind the window, which we can see but never touch.
Curated by: Jos Auzende
La Gaîté Lyrique would like to thank its partners:
The General Delegation of Quebec in Paris – Government of Quebec and the Canadian Cultural Centre for their support towards the Grand Format exhibition by Sabrina Ratté.
The Canada Council for the Arts for its support towards Distributed Memories.
