Isabelle Hayeur : Flow

Robischon Gallery features its first exhibition of the video work of recognized Canadian artist Isabelle Hayeur. Known as both a video artist and photographer, Hayeur states that her childhood in the Montreal suburb of Bois-des-Filion has had a lasting impact on her artistic practice. As in many peripheral towns in Quebec, and more generally in the industrialized world, the landscape has been subject to perpetual transformation. In her works, Hayeur is interested in the state of those territories, altered as they are by the array of technology at man's disposal. Effecting a reversal of the technocratic ideology driving these processes, Hayeur uses digital imaging technologies to create new landscapes. While the resulting imagery may feel as familiar as the surrounding environments, the process offers to reveal the flaws inherent in how human beings dwell in the world. Likewise in the exhibited video entitled Flow, the viewer initially enters a vast and comforting, pristine natural world – though eventually, a kind of submersion takes place where environments shift to those which are purposefully disorienting followed by hyper-focused images of industry at work.  Water, in the end, becomes the journey’s constant and essential resource.

          As both a video artist and photographer, the work fundamentally reflects Hayeur’s environmental and urban concerns. In tandem with these distinct bodies of work, her site-specific videos play with perceptions of reality by utilizing tromp-l’oeil to visually extend the architectural spaces they occupy within their environments. In 2012, Denver’s public art program at Denver International Airport commissioned a Hayeur video entitled Rising, a projection of an illusory and seemingly endless airport hallway at the Jeppesen Terminal, level 5.

The work of Isabelle Hayeur have been widely exhibited in numerous sites such as: the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, the Tampa Museum of Art and Akbank Sanat in Istanbul. A retrospective exhibition was devoted to Hayeur by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and Oakville Galleries. Featuring a monograph, this exhibition has been shown in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Alberta. She took part in the Arles Rencontres internationales de la photographie in the context of its Découverte prize. Her works are to be found in many collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Fonds national d'art contemporain in Paris, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.  A two-person exhibition entitled “Destiny Manifest,” which includes Hayeur’s work, opens at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs campus GOCA Gallery on April 4 through May 17, 2014