Opening reception: August 28, 2025, 5 to 7 p.m.
Exhibition: August 29, 2025 to October 26, 2025
Rooted in social and ecological struggles, Carol Priego’s approach here focuses on the conceptualization of landscape and explores the often porous boundary between landscape and its representation. Interested in experimental photographic methods, the artist questions the role of images produced and exported in a context of colonization and exploitation of natural resources. She questions the impact of these images on the collective imagination and the legitimization of acts of cultural and territorial dispossession. How are horizons modified and defined by human presence, while emerging from it? How should we view the archives and the stories they portray?
This time, Carol Priego experiments with the concept of the daguerreotype, whose production materials are also extracted from the ground. In the specific case of Rouyn-Noranda, where the first visual archives were captured in this way, the metals used to immortalize the landscape are the same ones that are extracted from it and contaminate it. In connecting the landscape and its imagery, the artist also explores its living character and memory. What is revealed in the visible, invisible, human, historical, and sometimes toxic traces that run through the layers of the landscape?
During her stay at L’Écart, Carol Priego is conducting research on the giant daguerreotype, which she reinterprets using raw materials—wood and copper—to form a hyperbole of the landscape and her own embodiment as a political subject. Through the exchanges and stories shared around her, the work will undoubtedly end up becoming a landscape in its own right.
Text by Gabrielle Izaguirré Falardeau, translated by Tourisme Rouyn-Noranda.
In partnership with Homesession, the Clark Center, and the Mille Feuilles workshop.
