Katherine Melançon is a multidisciplinary artist interested in making visible nature’s agency to transform human’s relationship to non-human beings. Her work takes the form of living connected installations, augmented tapestries, moving images and objects that intertwines traditional, obsolete and emerging image making techniques, collaborating with other humans and non-human beings. Often using the starting point of scanography of natural specimens, the new seeds are planted in various materials, exploring images’ fluidity through cycles of metamorphosis between physical and digital soils.
Katherine holds a master’s degree in fine arts from Central Saint Martins – University of the Arts London and a bachelor’s degree in interactive media from UQAM in Montreal. Her work has been exhibited at Joliette Museum (2023), Fondation Grantham (2022) and Fondation Phi (2019) in Canada, at the Max Ernst Museum in Germany (2023), the NovaXX Biennale in France (2021) and Arcadia Missa Gallery, UK (2011) in Europe, amongst others. In 2022, she was on the Sobey Art Award long list, the contemporary art awards in Canada.
Artwork description
Artist Katherine Melançon selects materials from the natural environment of each exhibition site. Thus, this project commenced with multiple meetings with different people at the College to pinpoint plant components suitable for her creation. The array of resources was vast, encompassing the greenhouse, vegetable garden, flowerbeds, green roof, inner courtyard, and Parc du Boisé-de-Saint-Sulpice. It was the latter location that captured her choice for crafting Nature morte – Boisé-de-Saint-Sulpice, unveiled in fall 2023.
In several aspects, Katherine Melançon continues a path initiated with her previous work. Firstly, the artwork showcases images of plants that contribute to the life of the installation location. Additionally, from a technical perspective, one can discern the manual scanography of moving elements, a technique she has honed throughout her artistic career. While some digitized components remain recognizable, the manipulation during the image design diminishes the iconic nature of the elements, distinguishing it clearly from documentary photography. Consequently, identifying the origin of the blurred and stretched forms becomes challenging. Lastly, the composition of the artwork relies on the digital collage of scanograms, which amplifies the effects of depth, overlay, and transparency of the combined images.
When considering the architecture of the installation site, the size of available wall surface, and the printing materials used, the project at Collège Ahuntsic represents a significantly larger scale than the artist’s previous works exhibited in 2021 and 2022. It is within stairwell T1.E1 that the artist chose to work on a grand scale, occupying the largest wall to create an immense still life. Not only is the artwork personalized due to its composition of local vegetation, but it was also tailored specifically for presentation in this precise location. In doing so, Katherine Melançon offers novel spatial experiences. While the artwork includes plants, tree bark, mushrooms, and even snails, viewers are not merely confronted with nature itself, but rather with an image of reconstructed natural elements that reference what they encounter in their surroundings. Through this artwork, the artist encapsulates all seasons within the College walls, yet there’s no need to venture far to encounter them directly outside, in their natural milieu. This piece rejuvenates the viewer’s connection to the space by reinforcing the bond between the institution and the nearby wooded area.