Charlotte Ghomeshi

Charlotte Ghomeshi is inspired by concerns that have haunted her since childhood: her fear of death, the dizzying vastness of nature, and the fragile balance that she perceives among possessiveness of, curiosity about, and amazement at the natural world. These existential anxieties are intermixed with the intimacy and sweetness of daily life; her family members are often central to her photographic and video projects. During her residency, Ghomeshi continued her exploration of her family roots in a three-part project suffused with vulnerability. As part of her search for her identity, she set out to tell the story of her grandparents and the illnesses they suffered late in life.

The first chapter drew Ghomeshi to her Iranian roots through her paternal grandfather, who lived with cancer for some twenty years. Unable to visit Iran due to its geopolitical situation, she travelled to Türkiye to find landscapes similar to those in which he grew up. The resulting series of images is imbued with the latent, indescribable distance that separates her from her forebears. In Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, she began a second chapter devoted to her Italian maternal grandfather, who suffered from multiple sclerosis for several decades. Her explorations were built on archival photographs, along with a CRT television set and a cassette player – obsolete, nostalgia-evoking devices that she used to re-create where her grandfather lived late in life. Audio and video montages revealing what he loved – songs by Jean-Pierre Ferland and Looney Tunes cartoons – are intercut with more-personal recordings, such as one of a phone conversation between Ghomeshi and her mother, and one in which she and her aunt smoke his pipe.

A new series of contemplative images, inspired by the effects of disease, featured the other artists in residency, who agreed to lie down on the river bank as if they were asleep on the rocks along the shore. The emotional charge emanating from the series arises from an approach sensitive to landscapes and images, carefully assembled to weave meaningful narratives from moments frozen in time, almost forgotten.