Artiste-professeure invitée

2022

Sabrina Ratté

Born in 1982 in Québec (Canada)

Sabrina Ratté is a Canadian artist who lives between Montréal and Marseille. Parallel to her studies in film production, she developed a significant interest in the early days of video art, which led her to ork with analogue technologies such as video synthesis and visual feedback. She later integrated 3D animation and other digital tools into her working process, which enabled her to develop a formal language that includes several different time frames.

Since then, her practice has continued to evolve as she explores the multiple manifestations of the digital image, be it video, 3D animation, photography, printing, sculpture, virtual reality, live performance. The continuous integration of new techniques formally underscores the themes that run through her work, such as the psycho-logical influence of architecture and the digital environment on our perception of the world, and our relation to the virtual dimension of existence.

Sabrina Ratté was nominated for the Sobey art prize in 2019 and 2020. Her works have been shown internationally by several institutions, including the Laforet Museum (Tokyo), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec (Quebec), Thoma Foundation (Santa Fe), the Centre PHI (Montreal), Whitney Museum of Art (New York), Chronus Art Center, (Shanghai), Museum of the Moving Image (New York). She is represented by Galerie Charlot in Paris and Galerie Ellephant in Montreal.

"My practice incorporates the inimitable textures, colours and forms of old technologies, such as video synthesisers mixers and visual feedbacks. This aesthetic is then integrated into three-dimensional environments. By using a diverse range of tools from different periods, I aim to get away from a certain nostalgia associated with analogue, while incorporating an organic quality into the digital image. The ensemble tends towards a timeless aesthetic in which refer-ences are presented but are not obvious.

My work is inspired by the tension between utopia and dystopia, physical and virtual exist-ence, immersion and distance, nature and tech-nology, sublime and repulsive. The ambiguity conjured up by these theoretically contradic-tory concepts leads me to question the nature of the real and, more specifically, the cultural and subjective parameters that construct and define that reality.

At Le Fresnoy, I will look more particularly at the relation between mental and physical space through the medium of video installation. My research will focus on the themes of transition and travel, virtual space, the notion of "home" and of the familiar, as well as the continuing metamorphosis in the way we look at the places surrounding us. The images will be created with the help of photogrammetry, a technique that makes it possible to digitise elements taken from reality in three dimensions. These images captured during my movements will be trans-formed and recontextualised inside virtual non-places, echoing the ones we inhabit and that inhabit us. Located half-way between hallucina-tion and reality, these familiar spaces will remain strangely unreachable."


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