Lucie Rocher, Expérimentations en atelier, 2022. Crédit photo: ENE / Jean-Sébastien Veilleux photographe.

Lucie Rocher

Artist / Spring 2022

Testimony

by Véronique Hudon

In her work, Lucie Rocher deploys images in space. Constantly playing with edges and frames, she puts the image in play in arrangements of various media, drawing on photography, sculpture, architecture, and design. In her work, the site she chooses is both subject of a photographic corpus and a metaphor for the creative process.

Lucie favours the use of materials found near workshops and construction sites. She transforms found scraps of wood and steel in various ways, highlighting relationships between matter and image to show the processes that governed their creation. During her residency, she created a sculpture from images of wood scraps. By digitizing the images, she created shapes that emphasized the matter. Then, she transposed these images onto rectangular sheets of Plexiglas, which were then overlapped to form a sculptural composition. The Plexiglas offers multiple plays on transparency: it reflects the trees that we see through the window while allowing different images to be superimposed. The structure of the work draws attention to the visual dispositif itself and to the ways in which it may influence our perceptions. This arrangement sits on a triangular base held up by three thin steel rods whose placement evokes an imbalance, a possible fall. Therefore, the sculpture puts its own fragility into play. This central piece is in dialogue with a grouping of elements arranged in the space: photographs of details of construction sites, sketches and drawings of the sculpture projected on a wall, wood scraps and frames set out on the floor. The association of these elements documents different stages of the creative process and opens a unique poetic field. Indeed, through her attention to details, Lucie develops a sensitivity that contrasts with the imaginary associated with construction sites.

Lucie creates contextual works – works whose meaning and form may be adapted to the immediate context. At Est-Nord-Est, the works are supported by the studio space; they play with its architecture and structural lines to create formal echoes. These pieces are intended to be recomposed in a different way in a different place. Lucie demonstrates the perpetual transformation of matter: by reusing leftover materials and giving them new life, she transcends their original form to expose their possible metamorphoses.

Biography

Lucie Rocher holds a PhD in art studies and practices from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2020), where she is currently a lecturer in photography. Inspired by her observation of and interest in urban construction sites at various stages of (in)completion, she explores their details in photographic installations that play on tension and formal balance. She thus builds a photographic construction site in constant evolution, the achievement of which is always pushed back to a later date. She has had solo exhibitions in Montreal (Maison de la culture Janine-Sutto, 2017; Occurrence, 2018; Hangar 7826, 2022), Quebec City (VU, 2018 and 2021), and Gatineau (AXENÉO7, 2020). She has also participated in residencies in Iceland (Sim Residency, 2015), Quebec (Sagamie, 2016 and 2019; L’Œil de Poisson, 2018; Daïmon, 2020), and Japan (Palais des Paris, 2019).