TELLURIS
Three photographic series – Telluris, Soulèvement and Démantèlement – form the basis of Noémie Goudal’s site-specific installation. Uniting them is a dual focus on real and imaginary geographies to create a space that oscillates between material existence and virtual projection, albeit with an analogue approach.
A skeletal wooden structure houses the works to enhance their manmade qualities; a dense and sprawling construction of vertical and horizontal lines that is configured into dizzying cube formations. This objecthood mimics the visual worlds that are conjured within Telluris – fabricated mountainscapes in the desert comprised of twenty-five stacked wooden cubes.
Works from Soulèvement also feature, summoning illusionary views that magically restructure the material appearance of jagged rock formations through the use of mirrors that turn them into fragmented image scenarios, in the process orientating new sensory experiences of the landscape and reminding us we need images of the world in order to make it comprehensible.
By a process of subtraction Démantèlement sees Goudal once again sculpts the landscape but by gradually reducing, and eventually totally obliterating, the sight of ridges and actual mountain peaks over a typology of images to challenge viewers’ geological gaze.
Disbelief and reflexivity are at the centre of Goudal’s experimentation with the photographic medium.
