ART CITIES: Montreal -Celia Perrin Sidarous

Celia Perrin Sidarous presents intuitively organized collages and sculptural assemblages that consider collections of objects and how they are transformed by the visual languages of photography and the studio. Her arrangements of colour, form and shape refer to still life, but also to the secret affinities between object and material. Perrin Sidarous’ images also suggest the implicit associations and secret affinities between objects and materials.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Parisian Laundry Archive

In her exhibition “Les figures”, Celia Perrin Sidarous presents a selection of photographs engaging with the enigmatic lives of objects through processes of collection and display, and the mechanisms of time and memory. Significant to her practice is the assemblage. Her images are the sites of dynamic juxtapositions and discrete repetitions. Objects are arranged in a logic that at once signals inwards as well as pulsates out associatively-extending to other objects, to the space of the studio, to that of the image and to the place of exhibition. These images are acts of recontextualisation and propose pictorial explorations realised exclusively for the camera. They attest to an interest for the physical presence of inanimate objects and to their potential for an inner life, while alluding to their transformation or transfiguration through the photograph. In certain ways, the items Perrin Sidarous pictures perform as points of entry into various areas throughout her entire body of work, a network of inconspicuous portals with no discernable ends. A mirror in one image may lead the viewer to a number of other photographs via the power of association. These unsystematic, irregular reiterations are further externalized to the gallery, particularly in the shape of sculptural forms intervening within physical space, ultimately mediating its relationship with image. In Perrin Sidarous’ installations, images are treated as possessing a spatial dimension and physical space is conceived of virtually, as image. The artist also complicates conventional understandings of the image’s relationship to time. By removing these objects and fragments from their ordinary real-world contexts and placing them together within the photographic frame, these images communicate beyond simple representation. A fundamental shift occurs when objects are captured through a photographic lens, it is a disruption of reality and familiar perception, images are fixed by a particular scale, perspective, point of view, or relationships. Celia Perrin Sidarous’ photographic series assembles prosaic objects into poetic gestures that punctuate the movement between three-dimensional form and two–dimensional image.

Info: Parisian Laundry, 3550 Saint-Antoine Ouest, Montréal, Duration: 14/1-13/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-17:00, www.parisianlaundry.com