Z Art Space proudly presents Le fond et la forme, an exhibition that reveals a uniquely engaging and empowering photographic paper-cut series by Montreal artist, Corinne Beaumier. This solo exhibition targets the artist’s quest to trace her Chinese origins through collective memories of her adopted Canadian family. These recollections consist of photographs dating back twenty-four years, depicting the early conditions of the artist’s own adoption, such as family portraits, handwritten records, topographical landscapes…all of which have achieved permanence in the present exhibition, pierced by traditional patterns of Chinese papercuts.
Chinese paper-cutting is the oldest form of traditional hand craft on paper. Often appearing in family homes and public areas throughout, these symbolic items denote luck, happiness and good fortune. In this exhibition, papercuts have been superimposed with early photographs illustrating the artist’s own adoption. Jointly, the resulting assemblage reveals a poetic confusion between voids of emptiness, suggestive of lost information, and visible subjects from the original photographs, while directly reflecting on Beaumier’s own ethnic and critical position as a contemporary Canadian artist.
Amid questions of identity, belonging and provenance, Le fond et la forme translates Beaumier’s attention to the traceability of information through time, both lost and gained. More acutely, this series showcases the artist’s deliberate gesture of admitting to lost information that contributed to her personal history, marked by a broken past. Rather than being a strictly constitutive exhibition of an unretrievable background, Le fond et la forme asserts to Beaumier’s conscious acceptance of a newfound fortune.
ABOUT
Corinne Beaumier is a Montreal-based artist currently completing photography studies at Concordia University. Her artistic practice mainly resides in photographic and videographic images. Several themes are of inspiration for her projects, such as family, identity, absurdity, as well as the artistic scene as a sophisticated complex.