Orchid proves in a sublime manner that digital images can grow into trees as well as take root.

MYRIAM BESSETTE: NÁCRE [03:35 min, 2007]

Here, we explore crackles and sparkles in a kind of chromatic sputter that suggests a pause in our viewing. For the video image evokes a contemplative dimension, even a form of stasis in our reception of it. As Filmmaker Anthony McCall pointed out, “when we look and listen to a video or movie, we enter into the elsewhere of the animated image, and we leave our physical body behind us, rooted in the place.” Which is to say that every image is a ubiquitous device: to look at it is in some sense to be not entirely there.

> www.perte-de-signal.org

MYRIAM BESSETTE (b. 1975, Montréal, Canada) > With a bachelor’s degree from the École des arts visuels et médiatiques de Montréal (UQAM), Myriam joined Perte de Signal in 2001. Her work is mainly oriented toward installation and single channel digital video in which she explores drawing and sound sampling. > Facing Myriam Bessette’s moving images, we can’t tell which component takes precedence, as the process underlying these works doesn’t seem to favour the visual. Sounds mingle with the images, not in juxtaposition or superimposition, but as a form of video art that issues from the interlace and derives from experimental animation.