Week 70: Vincent LaFrance

July 2, 2010 2

The rotating gallery features the work of an emerging photographer as well as an interview with him/her, and will change every Wednesday. The gallery is based off ‘collective curatorship’, where the photographer from week 1 chooses and interviews a photographer for week 2, week 2 chooses/interviews week 3, etc. There is only one stipulation to the process: Next weeks photographer has to be someone he/she has not had direct contact with yet. Ideally, this will take the gallery on a linked tour around the Internet, and exploring and unearthing new photographers as it goes.

This week, Radeq Brousil interviews Vincent LaFrance.

Radeq Brousil: Vincent, your works are filled with a certain type of irony and poetry. How would you describe your work to a person who has never seen your work before?

Vincent Lafrance: I am usually trying to avoid doing this. My work has gone in many directions and I hardly make sense of it; appart from it being indicative of my behaviour. I use art to filter my reality, it’s broad, it’s diversified. I have short and intense interest for things. But if I have to make an effort for you because you once invited me over in your family for easter I would say that I often use humor, visual gags and parody. My work also implies the vision itself, I use photography to underline aspects of my visual environment. I like watching. For me, seing is thinking. Somehow I am interested in perception, I create illusion and try to elaborate visual complexities. A lot of my pictures are about construction, like still life. I may be eclectic but I am also and deeply a traditionnaI photographer. I use film most of the time and print it directly on photo paper. I care about the surface. My discourse seems really inherent to the medium of photography, also because of the multiple reference to photography history. Now to end on something else, when I talk of my work to someone who doesnt know me, I usually try to speak about the present, about what I am doing now. It gives people a better sense of what you are interested in. It makes them believe that you are busy. We are attracted to busy people, we want to have a bit of their attention.

RB: You graduated from photography at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Do you think it’s important to study photography, especially today when we hear discussions about the death of this medium?

VL: I have never heard of a discussion about the death of the medium. Studying photography is just like studying anything else: you learn a language. It’s a great shortcut, it’s a fantastic blast of ideas and it’s also where you create most of your professional relationships. In Canada we live in an art environment that encourages discursive practice. The institutions are omnipresent allowing grants for artists. Those institutions requires a certain level of language and a certain precision in how we construct an art project. Going to art school gives you the tools to perform well within that system. It affects the art scene I believe, for better and for worse.

Radeq Brousil: Most of your older works are missing human element especially compare to your new videos. I see a big difference between your photographic and video works, is that any particular intent?

VL: The video work offers the opportunity to use language at another level. When I am surrounded with people, I define myself largely with speach. I am interested in how people communicate, I like to see people using words and formulation that gives them a certain caracter, a distinction. I am really sensitive to that. I like to be impressed by someones ability to describe reality. So at the end it seemed natural to start writting a script for actors and have them play a fiction. I was curious, I wanted to see something new coming out of me. I was tired of being me. I need new clothes too.

RB: What do you think about photography as a limited medium for “seeing things”, do you feel a need to cross this medium and go further behind 2 dimensional picture?

VL: Ask this to a writer; if he believe that his medium is limited by black symbols printed on paper. Think of poetry, the space that exist between a reader and the object- the book. That space is all what matters. Having someone standing in front of an image and making stories in his mind. Isn’t it the greatest contact one can have with art, this moment of generosity, of open mindness. It is actually all I am asking or hoping; someone caring and paying attention to a picture that I have made. It is, to me, the greatest form of interaction. So about the medium: you can go further or behind, it’s about the same, the finality is invisible.

RB: Do you see yourself more as a photographer, a director, an actor or a sculptor?

VL: I was trained as a classical photographer, all the rest is done with amateursim. I use some random skills in the process of making a work but most of what I do end up being a photography. I am a photographer.

RB: Montreal is well known for it’s music ; scene. Is this element of town you are living at important for you? Do you feel any influence?

VL: Only in the sense that music, more that any other art practice I believe, brings an important flux of cultural migrants. It creates vitality in this town so yes it influences me in that regards.

RB: Your brother is a painter and noise musician. How is it to have a brother working in the same field, especially art?

VL: Two of my brothers are working as artist (Etienne and David), my father was an art teacher, we care a lot about art in our familiy. It’s interesting because art instead of being a marginal practice as always been a natural way to find happiness. My older brother David holds a special importance. First, he is the head of our hockey league where I ended up top scorer in the last season with 56 goals. The painter Etienne Zack is just behind with 49 goals. Second, David is highly influential, somehow I need his approval on the project I am working on. I need him to be enthusiastic, otherwise I start having doubts. We all have someone like that in our lives. A writter friend told me that he was throwing his manuscript in the garbage when his wife doesn’t like it. I think he over estimate his wife.

RB: You visited a residency at BBB art center in Toulouse with the program Pepinière européennes pour jeunes artistes in 2009. Can you tell me some of your experiences, what is the program about and what have you made there?

VL: I tried to shoot a feature. I have found actors and rented a good camera. I am now editing a 75 minutes fiction. It’s a comedy, it’s absolutely experimental but also quite conventionnal. It almost starts looking like a real movie. It’s very french, almost in a parody manner. I have to say that I am really excited by this project, it looks like nothing I have done before. The residency was fabulous. They had me there for five month offering me the best working conditions, a great salary and a lot of human ressources. I bought an old red car and fancy vintage sunglasses and made everyone belive I was a director.

RB: You are represented by Division Gallery in Montreal. Is it important to be represented by a gallery in Montreal? What is the situation with galleries in your town?

VL: A gallery makes people think that you are good because for sure at some point someone decided to work with you believing you were good. It is also important for me since I show almost essentially photography in that gallery. Working with residencies and institutions is nice but it keeps me away from photography. Video is what I show in art center. It’s a money question. It is maybe not that important to be represented by a gallery if you can find your way through artist center, if your pracice fits well in that kind of circuit. My practice requires a gallery otherwise I would never put a picture in a frame.

RB: Any recent project of yours which you would like to talk about?

VL: I am making t-shirts right now. I use oil paint sharpies. I also take a lot of pictures. Lately I have been photographing flowers. But I am, before all, trying to finish editing my film. It’s good to close a project sometimes. Otherwise things are just pilling up. I have shot an animal documentary in 2008 and it still sits in the computer. It’s something I shot in Florida during a short residency. I am the narrator of that documentary in super 8 film. It is a comedy as well. It’s is very cartoon-like. It’s a piece about nature representation and animal depiction. Of course, It all goes wrong.