Luminous Visions: Rachelle Bussières
This week on Lenscratch, we look at a selection of artists creatively engaging with analog photographic processes within their practice.
In contrast to most photographers working in amber light, Rachelle Bussières’ sublime compositions manifest themselves by exposing photosensitive paper to the sun or studio lights anywhere from a few minutes to several day’s duration. These gestural lumen prints, reminiscent of an afterimage, radiate with soft yellows, lilacs, and mauves. Elegant and graceful, Bussières’ works may feel painterly, yet they are fundamentally photographic. Each image relies on the effects of exposure, light, and density to create the final result. Using lenses, glass, and fabricated metal tools, Bussières shapes and controls each exposure’s subtle variations, creating documentation of time and light specific to her studio environment. These prints do not capture the likeness of her subject; rather, they transcend, creating a light-filled essence while evoking a nebulous memory.
Currently on view: Les rythmes circadiens, solo exhibition on view from April 1- April 30 at Galerie Alexandre Motulsky-Fardeau in Quebec City. 1, Rue Dinan in Qc, Canada
www.rachellebussieres.com and @rachellebussieres
Existing at the intersection of photography and sculpture, my work investigates our wider human experience through light, perception and space. I fabricate reflective tools from bent metal, lenses and glass to make new photographic documents through the lumen print process, in which exposures of different light sources are registered on gelatin silver paper. Oscillating between two-dimensional images and three-dimensional objects, my compositions merge organic embodied forms with the natural world, anchoring my place within a universal experience. The photographic figures grow and diminish under sunlight and artificial sources, transforming my space into a recording studio dictated by my own conditions of time. Exploring themes of embodiment and cosmology, my practice integrates the sinuous movement and sensuous contours of light. Curvilinear waves glance off of elliptical arcs in forms which refer to both the otherworldly and the corporeal – astral movements and organic femme bodies; they embrace sensuality inspired by my personal embodiment practice, a intuitive-movement meditation which I use to enhance my senses and relationship with my physical body and surroundings. The color palette, compositions, and time exposures emerge from an intuitive desire to break away from photography’s prevailing masculine characteristics: technicality, distance, and control. My work is simultaneously personal and universal, connecting the ever-changing state of light and time with the fluctuations of physical and emotional movement.
Rachelle Bussières (Quebec City, Canada) received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2015. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Galerie AMF (Quebec City), Melanie Flood Projects (Portland), Penumbra Foundation (NYC), Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA) and Robert Koch Gallery (San Francisco). Awards include the Penumbra Foundation Workspace Fellowship, Canada Council for the Arts (Research and Creation), an honorable mention for the Snider Prize from the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and Finalist for the Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize. Recent group exhibitions include San Francisco State University, the World Trade Center (NYC), Rubber Factory (NYC), Seattle Pacific University (Seattle), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Brooklyn), Galerie l’inlassable (Paris), Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA), and Present Company (Brooklyn). She was an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects, Penumbra Foundation, Banff Center, SÍM, Vermont Studio Center, and Headlands Center for the Arts. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is present in various public, corporate, and private collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Four Seasons Hotel, SFMOMA Library and Archives, Facebook (commission mural) in Sunnyvale, Instagram, Inc., Microsoft, Brookfield and Penumbra Foundation in New York City.
Posts on Lenscratch may not be reproduced without the permission of the Lenscratch staff and the photographer.
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