September 30, 2010
Dalton Recital Hall
4 p.m.
In conjunction with the conference for the Society of Photographic Education Midwest Region.
More and more our eyes desert the "flesh of the world " in order to read and live in conceptual electronic representations. Spatiality (I include the body) is reduced to a visual construct alone, a way of seeing and a way of being seen, it's an ideational process in which the "image" of reality takes ontological precedence over the tangible substance of the "real" world (Virilio). Previously, I looked at how technology isolates, appropriates and affects our understanding of spaces and the body. Presently, my use of photo/video images, interactive technologies and sound, orients the work where the poetic and the seduction of images create a psychologically unsettling moment that questions our time/space experience as well as our experience of the self/subject. The work originates in an investment of the subject as agent, meaning a multiplicity and multidimensionality of its positions in relation to art's discourse, its investment and of its political powers to resist, to criticize and to contradict. It is a space evoked by but also remote from structures, language and articulated experience. It's a dialectic space between presence and absence, which I like to call "l'ailleurs" (the elsewhere) – a space situated at the intersection between the real and its metaphor. In this context, I will say that Art is largely social for me because it resuscitates again and again, our fears or desires, our hopes and anxieties, recording through itself our struggles as people who are acting at once in relationships to each other and living in a world that has its own relationships.
Sylvie Bélanger was born few miles from Montréal, Canada in a city that has since disappeared. For the last 20 years, she has been based in Toronto and lives a nomadic life, one that is continuously migrating between countries and cities. She received an MFA from York University, a BFA from Concordia University and a Baccalauréat in Philosophy of Religion from Université de Montréal. Before joining the Department of Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo, she taught at The University of Windsor, San Francisco Arts Institute, University of Toronto/Sheridan College and Concordia University.