Tanya St-Pierre & Philippe-Aubert Gauthier and Julie Tremble

Out of Perfect Context — Úr fullkomnu samhengi

From July 3 to August 28, 2025
📍 The Factory (Hjalteyri, Iceland)

An initiative developed in collaboration between Factory (Hjalteyri, Iceland) and Dazibao, Out of Perfect Context plays upon apparent incompatibilities and accentuated decontextualization to explore new forms of collaboration and exhibition-making. Starting from our relationship with nature and the role it plays in culture, the project proposes a meeting between urbanism and wide-open landscapes, image-making practices drawn from reality and others created entirely digitally, as well as an intersection, a confrontation even, between a fragile, endangered nature and an idealized, magnified nature. Two exhibitions will be presented, one at Dazibao, featuring works by Gústav Geir Bollason and Thorbjörg Jónsdóttir, and the other at Factory, featuring works by Julie Tremble and the duo Philippe-Aubert Gauthier and Tanya St-Pierre.

At times looking in from the outside and at others out from the inside, Out of Perfect Context underlines how sites and built environments influence our perception, and the ways in which we are part of the living world — or not. 

In this exhibition at Factory, featuring works by Julie Tremble and the duo Philippe-Aubert Gauthier and Tanya St-Pierre, an intentful environment of cinematic realism, created from a corpus of entirely digitally generated or manipulated images, rubs shoulders with the Icelandic landscape’s bucolic grandeur and the site’s imposing architecture. In an unsettling dialogue between reality and digital fantasy, Julie Tremble's realer-than-life images juxtapose the magnificent views framed by the building's openings, while Gauthier and St-Pierre's meticulously fabulated domestic spaces endeavor to embed themselves within the industrial history and ruggedness of the same site. In this reciprocal interplay of influence, the porosity of images, places, and the materiality of what we see sets the gaze in a kind of vertical time, where the accumulation of temporalities acts on our perception of the world and its representations. Such perception is also shaped and sometimes distorted by a noteworthy presence of sound.

In Abiogenesis: From Stars to Mummies, saturated, extremely detailed, representations of planetary or celestial landscapes examine the nature of elemental composition and its role in creating all living or non-living matter in the universe. Building from scientific data, the artist proposes a philosophical reflection on life and the future of humankind, exploring different perspectives appealing as much to reason as to technological speculation. A video portrait of Luce Guilbeault — an iconic figure of Québec cinema and late 20th-century feminism, who died prematurely at age 56 — depicts her at 127, as she would be today. The actress, imagined by Tremble, revisits her life, telling of a hypothetical future and the scientific developments that force ethical, political, and social problems upon humanity.

The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, for its part, responds to the virtual character of matter. Across three tableaux, majestic natural landscapes inspired by Northern Quebec’s wilderness are rendered with reverential photorealism. Observing the macro and the micro, the viewpoint voyages across hundreds of kilometres before a flickering disturbance pulls the image apart, diverging into an otherworldly landscape. Whether such a collapse is photonic or one of consciousness, those smallest elements — molecules, spectra – seen only through the lens of a microscope are made to appear radiating with absolute grandeur. In response to such happenstance encounters, the work's soundtrack, by composer and sound ecologist Rehab Hazgui, transposes quantum randomness onto the chance of sound.  

Dans un état hypnagogique — L'installation and Dans une sorte de rêve éveillé — L’invitation, by Philippe-Aubert Gauthier and Tanya St-Pierre, contemplate the desire and drive to domesticate nature. In an almost fantasized reading of the humanoid tendency to swallow what is wild, the artists question processes of consumption and representation. Taking as its source material an impressive series of collages by St-Pierre made from interior design magazines from the 70s and 80s, the two works, while dealing with radically different architectural environments — one within the framework of the luxury condo, the other the archetypal swanky bungalow — offer a kind of delirious visual archaeology in the form of multi-channel digital animations. The tearing, cutting, extraction, and assemblage inherent to such methodologies — manual or technological — multiply in meaning when applied to concepts of nature. Simultaneously brought to emphasis is an ideal to protect, a motif of comfort, and a menace, an indomitable uprising of lifeforms and inevitable invasion of that which is exterior to our interiors.

While the gaze hovers throughout the rooms, from the living room to the bedroom, images are transposed, folded onto one another, accumulating delicate strata of spectral auras whose composition sometimes betrays its source. We are hence brought forth into a hypereferentiality whose inferred dreamed-up climax forecasts a form of sublime collapse. The ambivalence of an unknown situation, amplified by a sonic universe whose timbre, intensity, and frequency multiply tensions and dramatic effects by synchronizing with the images.

Dazibao thanks the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for their support. 

Julie Tremble is a video and animation artist. Drawing on cinema, natural sciences, literature and philosophy, she is interested in the universe’s constitution, states of matter and how they are represented. Staging scientific theories and investigations, she produces experimental, contemplative and hallucinatory science fiction.

Her work has been presented in Canada and abroad, in art centers such as Museum Ludwig (Budapest), Dazibao, Darling Foundry, Galerie Joyce Yahouda (Montreal), STUDIOTELUS du Grand Théâtre de Québec, VU (Quebec City), Foreman Art Gallery and Sporobole (Sherbrooke). She has also taken part in various festivals, including the Mirage Festival (Lyon), Mapping (Geneva), Festival du nouveau cinéma, FIFA (Montreal), Images Festival (Toronto), the Espace [IM] Média triennial (Sherbrooke) and ARKIPEL (Jakarta). In 2013, she received the CALQ award for best work of art and experimentation. 

Tremble has also participated in international multidisciplinary conferences, including the International Society for the History Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (2023, University of Toronto) and Origine de la vie, discours et représentation (2023, Acfas, Université de Montréal). In 2023, she was awarded a research residency at the Institut de science et d'ingénierie supramoléculaires, Université de Strasbourg. 

Julie Tremble thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts for their support.

Philippe-Aubert Gauthier is a sound and digital artist, musician, engineer, doctor of acoustics and professor at École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’Université du Québec à Montréal. His artistic approach is based on the interaction between art, culture, science and technology, from a critical perspective. 

Tanya Saint-Pierre is a visual, sound and digital artist whose practice encompasses computer-generated images, video and installation. Her work, both poetic and conceptual, uses collage and sampling to explore possible relationships between visual or digital arts and narrative.

Each having an individual practice, Philippe-Aubert Gauthier and Tanya Saint-Pierre have been working as a duo since 2003, combining their interests and specializations. Their work has been presented in Quebec, Canada and internationally, in centers including STUDIOTELUS du Grand Théâtre de Québec, CIRCA art actuel (Montreal), IKLECTIC (London, UK), the Foreman Art Gallery at Bishop's University (Lennoxville), as well as festivals including Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Art Souterrain (Montreal) and Ftarri Festival (Osaka), among others.

Philippe-Aubert Gauthier and Tanya Saint-Pierre would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Grand Théâtre de Québec for their support.