Works from the Renders series
Works from the Renders series
By Andrea Chartrand
Toronto-based artist Andrea Chartrand’s series Renders provides a playful look at photography’s innate deceptiveness. Brightly coloured, strange tableaux showcase the formal gymnastic abilities inherent to photography’s engulfment in the digital. Horses and apples are stretched, pasted, warped, and skewed, while space and depth are compressed and confused. Chartrand’s gestures point to the infinite possibilities offered by editing software such as Photoshop, the medium’s analogue history, and the early motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge. While these images appear to be a complete submission to the digital, they are, in fact, created through an affinity for the physical.
The artist creates these deceptively digital-seeming tableaux through laborious physical processes. Shapes are created using various methods, including paper cutouts, clay, paint, mould building, and resin casting; these objects are placed together in a three-dimensional tableau and photographed. The resulting images translate Chartrand’s creations as seemingly compressed, digitally created worlds. This ongoing series pushes against the multiplicity that photographic printing invites through the artist’s insistence on creating a single print of each image. In its presentation at Olympic Village Station, Chartrand’s practice extends beyond unique prints and into the public realm. Installed in a display akin to the context of advertisements, the images lean into their titular reference, rendering a material confusion that invites multiple re-viewings.
Curatorial credit: Heather Rigg, Artistic Director, CONTACT Photography Festival
Exhibition Dates: April 1st – August 31st 2024
Image caption: Andrea Chartrand, Render No. 5 (detail), from the Renders series, 2021. Courtesy of the Artist
Presented in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival, Capture Photography Festival and the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC.
