Musée d’art de Joliette

Marina Gadonneix combines documentation, simulation, and fiction to make the energy around objects visible. Merging abstraction and figuration, place and non-place, she examines, through images, the photographic act and its ability to capture the “event” of the real.

The exhibition Phenomena, presented in collaboration with Les Rencontres d’Arles, explores scientific models that replicate natural events by probing the theatricality of the laboratory, a place of experimentation in which the world is constantly re-created. Through their artificial (re)production, these phenomena (an avalanche, a tornado, lightning, and so on) literally take shape and become things—entities that we can now grasp.

The resulting visual compositions nevertheless leave room for mystery, for undecidability. Enigmatic and seductive, the atmosphere created by these representations evokes the sensory rather than the rational: there are few clues to help us understand whether what is “happening” in the image is something marvellous or catastrophic. In a way, the work tests the collective imaginary of scientific narratives. Gadonneix examines the human desire to intellectually appropriate abstract things and transform intangible phenomena into objects (of study). In her staged images, she explores the notion of the elusive in relation to the intrinsic human need to measure and control what surrounds us.

Curators: María Wills Londoño, in collaboration with Audrey Genois and Maude Johnson