Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge, Artist Project
Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge is one of two artists commissioned by BlackFlash to produce a project for the 2.0 website. Her project is an interactive animation that playfully uses the idea of frames, specifically window and door frames, that draw attention between virtual and real parallels. Below are stills from the project. Click here or on a still to see the work yourself.
Note: You will require the free Adobe Flash player to view Evelyne’s work. The file is 5MB in size, please be patient while page loads.
A Challenge to Perception
Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge’s recent work reveals her interest in trompe l’œil as a method for the destabilization of vision. Her art undermines our perceptual presuppositions by making us conscious of our vision as an activity. Her strategies aim at the problematization of the viewer’s perception.
Perception results from the body’s capacity to track sensory changes in its interactions within the environment. It depends on the movement of the body in space. Perceptual consciousness consists of a complex set of skills of environmental attunement earned in a lifetime and embedded in the enactments of the body. Sight is built on a massive amount of background experience. Alva Noë, philosopher of cognitive science who is a proponent of this view, argues that the apparent immediacy of recognition through likeness in pictorial imagery relies on technologies of depiction developed in accordance with our skills. In other words, we construct pictures in adequacy with a perceptual repertoire inflected by culture. Pictorial recognition follows effortlessly.
As far as our expectations from visual representations are concerned, Leblanc-Roberge’s life scale “photographic” constructions, Guest Room and Living Room, seem, at first sight, to fit well within the traditional schemes that produce verisimilitude. Uneasiness follows instantly: doors contain conflicted perspectives, floorboards opt for their own vanishing point, and spatial recession falls in disagreement with its own appearance. We feel a loss of footing as our visual perception that projects us into the virtual space of the image falls at odds with our proprioceptors that fire warning signals though our nervous system: “beware, there is something wrong with what lies ahead.” The body expresses its distress as vertigo. We had already seen this at work in Giorgio De Chirico’s paintings.
But Leblanc-Roberge goes well beyond a photographic restaging of De Chirico’s un-resolvable perspectives. She alternately layers real and representational framing devices, such as doors and picture frames, containing each other in such a way as to allow for oases of security in the form of tangible bits of reality at once undermined and reset by fictitious frames. In this context, the relief or recess of the framing devices–illusory or real– play a key role in accentuating the sense of verisimilitude and push it into the arena of trompe l’œil.
As we uneasily perform a visual stumble into Leblanc-Roberge’s reconstructed interior spaces, we become aware of the fact that we construct our perception like an interlocking series of patchworks. Each element in this patchwork consists of attunements among units in a network of action-perceptions. The apparent coherence and familiarity of our visual environment relies on an imbrication of feedback across mutually supporting instances of action-perception. Leblanc-Roberge uses trompe l’œil for the subtle but disquieting undoing of the fabric responsible for the illusion of perceptual stability. In other words, she takes apart the background presuppositions that cause us to take vision for granted.
It becomes possible, then, to see Frameworks, Leblanc-Roberge’s compilation of contiguous and worn frames of ancient windows and storm doors through which we glimpse animations of modern indoor life, as a reference to the tensions she senses between traditional understandings of vision and the simultaneity of perception they can no longer contain. With the subtle discordances that her pictorial manipulations inject in our vision, Leblanc-Roberge reminds us that perception remains open for playful reconstruction in art.
Gerar Edizel
January 2010
Rochester, NY
