For the first time of his career, it is not his own photos Yann Pocreau is showing under the heading of Projections at the Darling Foundry. Instead, he has chosen to draw from the iconography of his personal album a collection of antique postcards of French Gothic churches to realize the three works of this exhibition. The aging 1930s reproductions of the Saint-Laurent, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont and de la Trinité churches, the Sainte-Croix cathedral and the Sainte Chapelle are manipulated, staged, pierced, scratched, to allow the appearance of this divine light, sought after by religious architecture and here created artificially. These images are produced by way of different mediums – installation, bas-relief and film – with which the artist experiments in a “quest to throw light on the photographic object”, in his own words. In Projections, religious architecture and photography intersect to bring to light their common uses, namely sublimation and staging, illusion and dramatization.
The artist would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Darling Foundry team, the Simon Blais galery, Le Centre et l'atelier CLARK, François Marceau, Benoit Cool, fulux, Le Cabinet, espace de production photographique, Main Film, Jean-François Hébert, Brigitte Henri, Nancy Belzile, Alban Berg and Isabelle Malenfant for their help and valuable input.
Lightning execution for the work « Cathédrale » : François Marceau
Yann Pocreau
Yann Pocreau holds an MFA in media and visual arts from Université du Québec à Montréal. Long-listed on the 2018 Sobey Art Award and a finalist of the 2018 Louis-Comtois Award from Ville de Montréal for mid-career artists, he conducted residencies at ISCP New York (2018), at the Mont-Mégantic Observatory of Université de Montréal (2018), as well as at Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM). His work is represented by Galerie Simon Blais in Montreal.