TANYA ST-PIERRE  & PHILIPPE-AUBERT GAUTHIER

Portrait video by Tanya St-Pierre, initially presented as a video installation. The video is based on digital photography, no post-processing was involved in the creation of this video. As an exemple, the progressive white saturation is solely caused by the fact that the spots were at some times moved towards the subjects.

The video was created from a series of photographs taken in my studio. The photographed action relies on the presence of two bodies evoking an ancient statue with the intention to show a glimpse of mystic charge. The action deployed itself on a two hours period and was documented such as we photograph a very stable performance. The video ends on a static image … Freezing the two partially revealed bodies in a fixed reality. We could say that the video returns to it's original photographic form.

The esthetic research axis for "Pieta / A Mystery Unfolding" were the mysticism, the sacred and the mythological representation of the body. Pieta is a popular religious icon created by Michaelangelo Buonarroti in the 16th century. My first interest in this sculpture was the generous presence of drapes (drapés). In fact the "drapé" is frequently present in my work, as an esthetic proposition about the opaque body, the taboo and mysterious body, which comes from my interest in questioning notions of representation issued from grand archetypes of the apprehension of the world such as the scientific thought and the mystic thought, also called magical thought.
 
You can see the short video at:
https://vimeo.com/122487210