Unfinished Business

May 6 – June 5, 2010

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 6, 2010, 7:00 – 9:00 pm

French artist Eric Baudelaire explores relationships between images and events, documents and narratives. Recalling factographic practices, his video work often involves elaborate staged scenarios that appear to be real, but are somewhat off-kilter, placing the viewer in a situation of questioning the modes of production and consumption of images, as well as the representation of political events and social constructs. Baudelaire also uses simple techniques of assemblage, sampling and mechanical reproduction, applied to real documents, to playfully extract fictive narratives or new formal vocabularies.

In recent years, he has produced works in chapters – discrete cycles based on allegories of movement, including Circumambulation (2006-07), and Anabases (ongoing). With Unfinished Business, Baudelaire combines, for the first time, works that originated in two different cycles, putting them back into play in the context of a time-based exhibition. The images from Circumambulation relate to the traumatic and hyper-mediated events that unfolded after 9/11, an obsessively repetitive imagery, prodding our affective responses of numbness or loss. In Anabases, it is the images themselves that are lost – real documents taken from their context, rearranged to open up new narrative spaces or initiate original forms. Combining elements of these two bodies of work with a few new pieces, Baudelaire examines their intersections in new ways, underlining aspects of the unresolved nature (and business) of images. Working with lighting cycles and alternating video projections in order to reveal or hide different works, Unfinished Business regards the image as a fluctuating form, playing with its evolving narratives and cultural associations in the context of a particular time and space.

Eric Baudelaire is presented in conjunction with the CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival, May 1-31, 2010 (www.contactphoto.com) and with the gracious assistance of the Consulate general of France in Toronto.