Claudia Imbert and Jacques Damez in creation residencies

Claudia Imbert and Jacques Damez in creation residencies

In June, Rencontres will be welcoming artists Claudia Imbert (Montreuil, France) and Jacques Damez (Lyon, France) one after the other for creation residencies in the Gaspé.

Taking place as part of the Gaspésie-Picardie pour la photographie project, Claudia Imbert’s residency will run from June 18 to 28. The results will be presented beginning August 2015 in the Gaspé at the 6th edition of Rencontres, and then in the fall of 2015 as part of the Photaumnales festival in Beauvais, France. Born in 1971, Claudia Imbert worked for 10 years in film, as assistant camera operator and then as camera operator. Since 2005 she’s journeyed between photograph and film. She explains: “The back-and-forth between fixed image and moving image creates a fresh dialectic that fuels my artistic process.” Trained at Miami Dade College, Florida, and at École supérieure de réalisation audiovisuelle and École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, both in Paris, Claudia Imbert was a winner of the Bourse du talent BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France Talent Grant) in 2007, earned special mention for the Prix Lucien et Rodolf Hervé in 2008 and was winner of the 2011 Prix Jeune Création.

Jacques Damez, meanwhile, will be in the Gaspé from June 25 to July 6. Born in Lyon in 1959, he founded Galerie Le Réverbère with Catherine Dérioz in 1981, and the two have been its directors ever since. “In the course of two visits lasting from 15 to 20 days each, I’ll be doing a Montreal-Gaspé loop (there and back),” he explains. “My photo and video points of view will be determined by the names of places. During these two trips, one in late June, the other in late December, I will photograph and film the same sites: on the one hand, nature bursting forth, and on the other, the same nature in a frozen state.” The artist’s destinations will include Cap-Chat, Ruisseau-à-Rebours, L’Anse-Pleureuse, Gros-Morne, Manche-d’Épée and Gespeg. “My intention is to meet the inhabitants of each site to collect interviews, asking people at each place what they know of the history of its name. That series of recordings will make it possible to discover the very specific accents of each region and will create a new fiction of the places. In the Micmac tongue, Gespeg means ‘land’s end,’ a good definition of this Canadian peninsula pounded on the north by the waters of the Saint Lawrence River and bounded on the south by the Baie des Chaleurs running off the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The peninsula is the final burst of the Appalachian chain before it plunges into the gulf. Scanning and reading the map is invitation enough to set off for this land of legend…” The results of these artistic research projects will be presented at Rencontres in the summer of 2016.

More info on these artists at claudiaimbert.com and at galerielereverbere.com