Léna Mill-Reuillard
Machinari

From November 19, 2015 to January 30, 2016
Opening on November 19 at 7 pm

Production-dissemination residency in collaboration with PRIM

The recipient of this year’s PRIM-Dazibao production-dissemination residency Léna Mill-Reuillard created the installation Machinari. Through a variety of manipulations, the work plays on perception by alternating still and moving images and real and fictional spaces. In a sequence of tableau shots, a series of spatial and temporal illusions thwarts the viewer’s gaze in order to better catch them in the play of the image. From bucolic horizons to domestic scenes by way of formalist compositions, the work steers a fine course between images, places and temporalities.

By taking the stage in the work and manipulating the images before our eyes, Léna Mill-Reuillard gives presence, materiality and corporeality to the representation. These performed gestures, not unlike those associated with a photographer, suggest a broader enquiry into our relation to the image, one that raises the issue of the construction, transmission and interpretation itself of the image.

In this exhibition, Léna Mill-Reuillard’s work is seen alongside that of Gabriela Löffel and Nadia Seboussi. Although each has a singular theme, the three artists examine the methodology of representation and what lies in the interstice between our vision of the world and the image, on the perceptual, socio-political and semantic levels alike. The three projects brought together here offer a gaze on the way we convey the world through images, thereby raising the entire question of the influence, transmission and rewriting of history.

Léna Mill-Reuillard works with images, whether photographic, videographic or cinematic. She holds a bachelor’s degree in cinema and a master’s degree in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her work has been shown at the Galerie de l’UQAM, the gallery Les Territoires and at Centre VU. Several films on which she has worked as director of photography have travelled to numerous festivals. One of them, La coupe (The Cut), won the Short Film Jury Award: International Fiction at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

The artist thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, Dazibao, PRIM, Le Cabinet and Post-Moderne for their support as well as everyone who contributed to the project.