Archipel, 2021

Montreal-based artist Yann Pocreau works across photography, sculpture, and installation, and holds a keen interest in slide projections, light, and colour. He reimagines found photographs through interventions that consider photography’s complex connection to memory and time.

Archipel is based on a found 35mm slide photograph, originally intended for projection in the context of a larger grouping of travel photographs. Projecting the image onto the wall of his studio, Pocreau repeatedly re-photographed the image with slight colour variations, suggestive of a film strip or contact sheet. Location unknown, the quintessential landscape captures the hazy horizon and the vastness of the sea, framed by a shadowy cliffside, with a solitary island at its centre. The artificial colours evoke a mysterious, dream-like quality that is both haunting and familiar, futuristic yet timeless. The subtle shifting of colour across the three images allows room for alternative narratives and emotions. Like an archipelago formation, Pocreau’s work creates the possibility of different spaces or experiences as the island repeats. Here, one can question photography’s role in understanding our relationship to the natural world: With the oversaturation of images in today’s public realm, are they becoming an “adequate” replacement for the real?

Presented as a large-scale, three-part mural on the glass façade of Vancouver’s King Edward Station, a short distance from the Pacific coast, Archipel is a poetic meditation on time and place. The evocative, futuristic-yet-nostalgic stillness of the work suggests a sense of solitude and questions the future of our tumultuous world.

Presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC. Presented in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival. Generously supported by Rob Bruno.