ARTISTS
No茅mie Goudal: Haven Her Body Was
Les filles du calvaire gallery is pleased to present the first solo show of No茅mie Goudal, a young french photographer, and laureate of the HSBC prize for Photography in 2013, at the gallery.
The Geometrical Determination of the Sunrise
If No茅mie Goudal鈥檚 work seems to offer multiple ways in which it can be approached, this is because it maintains ambiguous connections with reality, relationships that are revealed to be the very essence of her universe鈥攆or it is indeed a universe that we can speak of with regard to her work. This universe spans from her selection of sites for her photographs to the installation of large format images in unusual places.
Many of her photographs show enigmatic constructions, modern ruins for which concrete seems to be the favoured material, that of a dessicated and soulless civilisation whose utopias have drowned in who knows what lake. It is nature that has taken over; we will return to this later. By working on this kind of 20th century archaeology, its dreams of greatness or of conquests with a totalitarian or industrial vision, No茅mie Goudal鈥檚 work fits within the tradition of artists of the same generation, such as Geert Goiris and Guillaume Lemarchal *, with close ties to photography, or Cyprien Gaillard who, like Goudal, uses several media. Through their implacable images, they also examine the vestiges and aberrations of certain aspects of our civilisation such as it has developed in the 20th century. For No茅mie Goudal, the series Haven Her Body Was evokes a world on the road to ruin, a world that rebuilds itself differently. She questions the fragility and the power of nature and the relation it maintains with man: ruins were a departure point; then it is nature that takes over human constructions. Thus the latter have been destroyed by violent natural elements, such as hurricanes or the force of the sea.
This series of images with a strong architectural connotation could suffice in itself and spread out in an autarchic way, in a kind of abstract monumentality, existing only because of the photographer鈥檚 gaze, at that instant when reality joins fiction. Little by little, however, No茅mie Goudal makes these elements of modern ruins slide towards equally singular vegetal apparitions, they too emerging from the aquatic surface. One and the other can be perceived as observatories dominating a landscape and structuring it like promontories. Although it goes without saying that this observatory term infers the notion of point of view, the photographer seizes hold of it in a quite personal way, by reviving the practice of stereoscopic photography. 鈥淚 created stereoscopes with images that I composed digitally, not with a typical stereoscopic camera. Hence the 3D effect appears on only one part of the image.鈥� Superposing images, fragmenting points of view and developing new perspectives are central to No茅mie Goudal鈥檚 concerns.
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Les filles du calvaire gallery is pleased to present the first solo show of No茅mie Goudal, a young french photographer, and laureate of the HSBC prize for Photography in 2013, at the gallery.
The Geometrical Determination of the Sunrise
If No茅mie Goudal鈥檚 work seems to offer multiple ways in which it can be approached, this is because it maintains ambiguous connections with reality, relationships that are revealed to be the very essence of her universe鈥攆or it is indeed a universe that we can speak of with regard to her work. This universe spans from her selection of sites for her photographs to the installation of large format images in unusual places.
Many of her photographs show enigmatic constructions, modern ruins for which concrete seems to be the favoured material, that of a dessicated and soulless civilisation whose utopias have drowned in who knows what lake. It is nature that has taken over; we will return to this later. By working on this kind of 20th century archaeology, its dreams of greatness or of conquests with a totalitarian or industrial vision, No茅mie Goudal鈥檚 work fits within the tradition of artists of the same generation, such as Geert Goiris and Guillaume Lemarchal *, with close ties to photography, or Cyprien Gaillard who, like Goudal, uses several media. Through their implacable images, they also examine the vestiges and aberrations of certain aspects of our civilisation such as it has developed in the 20th century. For No茅mie Goudal, the series Haven Her Body Was evokes a world on the road to ruin, a world that rebuilds itself differently. She questions the fragility and the power of nature and the relation it maintains with man: ruins were a departure point; then it is nature that takes over human constructions. Thus the latter have been destroyed by violent natural elements, such as hurricanes or the force of the sea.
This series of images with a strong architectural connotation could suffice in itself and spread out in an autarchic way, in a kind of abstract monumentality, existing only because of the photographer鈥檚 gaze, at that instant when reality joins fiction. Little by little, however, No茅mie Goudal makes these elements of modern ruins slide towards equally singular vegetal apparitions, they too emerging from the aquatic surface. One and the other can be perceived as observatories dominating a landscape and structuring it like promontories. Although it goes without saying that this observatory term infers the notion of point of view, the photographer seizes hold of it in a quite personal way, by reviving the practice of stereoscopic photography. 鈥淚 created stereoscopes with images that I composed digitally, not with a typical stereoscopic camera. Hence the 3D effect appears on only one part of the image.鈥� Superposing images, fragmenting points of view and developing new perspectives are central to No茅mie Goudal鈥檚 concerns.
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