Rencontres internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie is delighted with the success of its 3rd edition, which wound up on September 10, on the theme of “Shaping the course.” The organization is enthusiastically preparing its 4th edition, which will run from July 10 to September 11, 2013, in 14 host municipalities, and is sending out an appeal for proposals.
“Each year Rencontres puts on display different photographic outlooks and approaches, from here and elsewhere,” states executive and artistic director Claude Goulet. “While the public can track the work of certain artists from one year to the next – principally by way of our artist residencies – it also has the opportunity of discovering the work of new photographers, recognized or emerging, edition after edition.”
New York photographer Nick Kline, who took part in Rencontres for the first time this year, is excited about the experience of the event’s professional week. “For me, Rencontres was like running a marathon. It involved a lot of complex logistics, long distances to travel, highs of seeing great work and meeting amazing people, moments for the mind to wander in varied scenery and waves of tiredness because it’s non-stop. I’m home and feel profoundly enriched because of it.”
Artist residencies: a bridge between different editions
The yield of a number of visits by Serge Clément (Montreal, Québec) to the Gaspé Peninsula and to the Magdalen Islands from 1970 up to today, the installations for his project Platform were presented in 2012 in Rivière-à-Claude and in Percé as part of Parcours du point de vue – Gaspésie. Bearing on the evolution of the landscape and its correlation with human and social activity, they successfully kindled the interest of Gaspesians of all ages. Rencontres foresees carrying on with the display of installations from the Platform project in 2013.
Beatrix von Conta (Peyrins, France), who presented the exhibit Timişoara, Between Gray and Green in Marsoui for the 2011 edition of Rencontres, was back in the Gaspé this summer for an artist residency. With a critical distance, the photographer has spent 25 years questioning the fragility of the contemporary landscape. She highlights, with no trace of nostalgia, both the slight and the more prominent signs of a progressing mutation. The result of her work on Gaspesian territory, entitled The Great Divide, will be unveiled at the 2013 edition of Rencontres.
Jocelyne Alloucherie (Montreal, Québec), who this year exhibited the project Sirens in Paspébiac, will rejoin us next year for a residency project. Excited by the scouting that she has been able to carry out in 2012, she will put down roots in the Gaspé for picture taking in 2013. The work of Jocelyne Alloucherie has always focused on two major planes, architecture and landscape, and in the Gaspé her plan is to produce an installation that merges photographs and architectural modules.
Note also that Guillaume D. Cyr and Yana Ouellet (Quebec City, Québec), who in 2012 presented the project Gaspésie Human Less, Part 1 in Chandler, are currently artists in residence in France in the framework of the partnership between Rencontres and the Conseil général de la Vendée. Vendée photographer Frédéric Merlet, meanwhile, will be in residence in the Gaspé beginning September 26.
Furthermore, Rencontres plans on continuing, in 2013, its collaboration with Maryse Goudreau (Pointe-à-la- Croix, the Gaspé), who these last years has presented Events for the Memory of the Docks. In August 2012, on the Chandler dock, she photographed hundreds of extras from a perch in an aerial basket 63 feet above the ground with an 1870s-vintage camera and a period process (humid collodion). Her interventions put a face on the dreadful disappearances being suffered by many Gaspesian docks.
Call for proposals
Rencontres internationales de photographie en Gaspésie invites photographers who would like to take part in the event to submit their proposals. Although they will be accepted at all times, proposals will preferably be submitted before November 1 in order to be processed for the next edition. Details and form: admissions.photogaspesie.ca.
Photo: Vernissage of Serge Clément, in Percé.