Nelly-Eve Rajotte^CA/QC

After graduating with a BA in art history, Nelly-Ève Rajotte undertook a second undergraduate degree at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques (UQAM), which led to a master's degree in 2006. She participated in numerous exhibitions in Québec, at the SAT, the Darling Foundry, Parisian Laundry, Occurrence, Clark, Optica and Circa among others. Her works have been presented in several festivals across the world, and have also been broadcast in many festivals in Canada, MUTEK Montréal, as well as Mutek Japan, Mutek Argentina and Mutek Mexico, ISEA MTL 2020, Festival International du film sur l’Art, International short film festival of Berlin and Official Selection at Transmedial Berlin (Germany), Lab30, Manchester UrbanScreens (UK), KIKK Festival Namur, Moscow International film Festival and Finnish Contemporary Art Fair.

Nelly-Ève Rajotte is a multidisciplinary artist that works at the confluence of performance, video and installation. Known among others for her monumental projections, Rajotte is interested in the sensory condition of the spectator experience. She investigates the relationship in space and probes the arborescence of physical sensations and psychological states registered through perception. In this sense, her joint work of image and sound reflects a certain alterity of representation and experience.

Around the recurring figure of the landscape, Rajotte takes a romantic approach where tension and opposition interplay with composition used to explore the building process of the images. She borrows from cinematographic strategies, editing effects and staging that not only transform, but aesthetize reality. The landscape is refined and fragile, and is thus asserted through the artist’s operations as a cultural object. Her sound accomplishes this unnatural shift of images, weaving around her some sort of atypical universe to the point anxiety. The acoustic environment doubles the sensory experience of the work by simultaneously conflicting and supporting the image’s narrative. These frames meet, repel each other and destabilize their reception. In sort, they challenge the heart of the work.

Her approach is distinguished by its clear interest in perception, and she radicalizes its scope. This monitoring exercise is not motivated by technological devices, but by organizing an open environment on interpretation. Her compositions are like those of a painter working to augment the fundamental temporal dimension of an experience. Image and sound materialize in time, attract attention, registers in a given space and finally gives in to convey the full power of the work.