Jacques Damez
in Paspébiac

EXHIBIT AND PROJECTION

Photoponymie en Gaspésie
(Photoponymy in the Gaspé)

LeBoutillier & Brothers warehouse on the Banc-de-Pêche-de-Paspébiac Historical Site | 76 3e Rue | Paspébiac
Schedule: every day from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Jacques Damez, Lyon France | galerielereverbere.com

Born in 1959, Jacques Damez is dyslexic, and turns naturally in the direction of pictures. His second mother tongue thus becomes photographic.

In the early 1980s he opened a gallery with Catherine Dérioz to promote and reflect on this way of collecting the real. Thirty-five years later, the adventure continues: still a photographer and still a gallery owner.

He used this window of time to attempt to forge links between the two languages in an essay dealing with the importance of photography in the work of Hans Hartung, Hans Hartung photographe, la légende d’une œuvre, and for it received the 2005 Prix Arald for essays. Over his photographic career he has published close to a dozen other books, and he continues to be part of numerous personal and collective exhibitions.

Basically, he takes photographs because it is one of his greatest pleasures, and because he is sure that it conveys the gist of things.

EXHIBIT ANDPROJECTION AT RENCONTRES

Photoponymie en Gaspésie
(Photoponymy in the Gaspé)

Photoponymie en Gaspésie* is the dotted line of the edges of a world, the coming and going of seasons united by the names of places. The names attributed to sites are never arbitrary; they are deeply anchored in the history that, over time, has been erased, leaving only magic, a ghost.

“In my travels, my itineraries, my wanderings, between sites whose names embody an obscure and astonishing poetry – Kamouraska*, Rimouski*, Ruisseau-à-Rebours, Pointe-à-la-Frégate, Cap-aux-Os, Coin-du-Banc, Cap-d’Espoir, Paspébiac, Gesgapegiag, Causapscal – I orientated my objective according to my perception of the blank spaces in time, organized by place names. Then I confronted my sense of time and duration in a return trip between photography and videography.

Photoponymie en Gaspésie extends my research and my questioning about the intimacy between the still image and the image in motion. That dialogue fascinates me. The conversation between those two tools falls within the shapes of time that each one summons up; it allows me to become a watchman of emptiness, to seek the instant when the black hole, the point of obliteration of light in an explosive energy, creates images.”

Jacques Damez, June 6, 2016

*The artist also took pictures in Kamouraska and in Rimouski, in the Lower St. Lawrence.