 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Dominique Blais |
|
For L.F.D.A. 02.Untitled (Chandelier) is an installation created by Dominique Blais for the exhibition Visions Nocturnes presented in spring 2008 at La Galerie in Noisy-Le-Sec, during Blais’s period as artist-in-residence. Blais chose to work in situ for the installation, drawing on the art centre’s past history as a private house. Bringing the old house’s “hidden atmosphere” dramatically to the fore, Blais made a series of recordings of ambient sounds when the art centre was closed – imperceptible, insignificant noises, very probably ignored until then, but which form part of the body and fabric of the partially transformed building. Sounds that constitute its memory, living proof of the passage of time. Next, Blais reinstated an old French window which had been boarded up to create hanging space for the new art centre. Traditional plaster mouldings were added, and a false ceiling installed, with a central rose from which hangs a black, wrought-iron chandelier. Blurring the frontiers between the visible and the audible, this strange lamp – a reference to the building’s old wrought-iron balconies – diffuses almost no light, but the sounds recorded by the artist, instead. With filters placed on the glass panels of the French window, and no other source of artificial light, the room is plunged into semi-darkness : a fictive, ghostly space, unreal because of its “anachronistic” nature, both within and outside time. [V.Th.] Dominique BlaisDominique Blais is a multimedia artist conducting visual and sound experimentation, interested particularly in visible or invisible memory of places and persons. His favourite materials being tools or devices to project light or sound, he does not hesitate to use all kinds of cultural products, to succeed in creating the desired effect in the spectator. Minimalist, abstract or conceptual, his creations exist in on intangible, fantasy space and time juxtaposing mental images edited meaningfully from elements which at first view have no meaning. [V. Th.] Dominique Blais was born in 1974.
 Dominique Blais |
