L’image signée – L’image signée – Benoit Aquin, Alain Paiement, Jonathan Plante, Chloe Lum & Yannick Desranleau (Séripop)

Opening cocktail: September 12, from 3 to 5pm with the artists in attendance

Galerie Hugues Charbonneau starts up the new season with an exhibition responding to the theme of the 2015 edition of le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, post-photography. L’image signée brings together Benoit Aquin, Alain Paiement, Jonathan Plante and Seripop (Chloe Lum & Yannick Desranleau) in an exhibition where each work asserts, in its own way, both the important role of the author and his or her presence in the image.

Post-photography describes a situation in contemporary photography that is characterized by a heightened accessibility to new technologies and the ubiquity of networked image-sharing applications and web platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, etc. are tools for creation and dissemination that also overturn notions of originality and the integrity of the photograph in contemporary art. Le Mois de la Photo has chosen to present a selection of artists whose works have formed the aesthetic canon that these new tools seem to have given birth to.

Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, however, invites the viewer to consider the question from a different angle, reversing post-photography’s erasure of the author and the subsequent danger for art itself. Instead, L’image signée brings together works that frame the artist’s hand and bear witness to the making and workmanship of the image. Each work questions the limits of photography and, in so doing, reaffirms its attachment to contemporary art, particularly in light of these recent developments in our relationship to images. Benoit Aquin spotlights his own presence through the use of powerful flash; Alain Paiement composes dizzying ensembles of spherical images; Jonathan Plante plays tricks on the viewer through the presentation of painted images in motion; and Seripop deconstructs the two-dimensionality of photography in sculpture.

Each of these artists puts his or her signature on an image that sincerely believes in its own uniqueness, undeterred by the current overabundance of photographic imagery.

Views of the exhibition: