Marie-Jeanne Musiol
Plant Cosmos
Marie-Jeanne Musiol
Plant Cosmos
a CONTACT Photography Festival Featured Exhibition
May 5 – June 2, 2018
Opening Saturday May 5th from 3 pm to 6 pm
Artist in attendance
In a featured exhibition for Contact 2018 at Centre Space (65 George St., Toronto), photographer Marie-Jeanne Musiol will show a series of new images highlighting the activity and the energy transfers occurring around plants. Captured on negative with their electromagnetic field, leaves pulsate and radiate in unexpected ways.
A video projection of the artist’s Luminous Fields was programmed last year in Toronto on the large TD Bank screen at the corner of Queen and Bay St. Leaves filmed in real time could be seen responding to various impulses and reacting to human interventions.
Conversely, the images of Plant Cosmos being shown at Centre Space are more closely related to photo stills, in their capacity to freeze energy patterns. In the continuity of works issued from her extensive “energy” herbarium, the artist probes the coronas of vines, geraniums and foxtails and examines their details. These reveal unexpected landscapes where energy and matter intermingle.
Marie-Jeanne Musiol has previously extracted elements reminiscent of cosmic formations. She presently uncovers immersive and non directional panoramas that speak to fluid boundaries between matter and light. The edges of leaves with their substance do not spell defined outer limits. They exist in a space where light and matter bring about form and physicality, or where matter dissolves into light. These various states operate in ways not apparent to the eye, yet fundamental in a universe populated by subquantum particles travelling freely between dimensions.
Several works of the exhibition are referenced indirectly in a book with 385 duotone illustrations, authored by the artist and just published in French by Les éditions Pierre-François Ouellette, La Forêt radieuse : un herbier énergétique (The Radiant Forest: An Energy Herbarium). The book will be available for consultation during the exhibition.
Both the exhibition and the book highlight questions of scale in the very small and the very big, indicative of fluid states of being.