Mathieu Grenier Crystal Gazers

Montreal artist Mathieu Grenier’s practice centres on experimenting with the two-dimensional conventions of photography, using alternative photographic processes to create installations that delve into our relationship to visual technologies. Combining methods including digital printing, cyanotype, and metalwork, Grenier focuses on the experience of photography within a naturalized digital environment, highlighting the hyperconnected and fragmentary ways in which we relate to image culture. In this new exhibition, Grenier continues his experiments in a series of large-scale cyanotype prints and digital collages printed directly onto LCD screens.

Using various image sources including screenshots, stock images, glitches, image-processing windows and more, and employing a UV-printing process, Grenier prints digital collages onto defunct, recycled LCD screens. A meditation on digital culture, image production, and technology itself, the work hinges on both the accumulation and waste inherent to all three. An effect of the now-common, hyper-accelerated state of perpetual expectation to produce and consume more, the transactional nature of these activities produces a distinct feeling of dehumanization and fatigue.

Drawn to the cyanotype as a primary method of image-making, Grenier has also been using the debris of defunct monitors to create large-scale contact prints on cotton, producing images that resemble cracked screens and other battered technologies. Moving away from the typical blue pigment of the cyanotype, he has now developed his own chemical transformation process by bathing, bleaching, and tinting the cotton with various solutions to produce images in a black and white duotone.

Begun in 2020, this ongoing series titled The Monitors showcases the organic forms and elements that parallel the aesthetics of technology. Naturally occurring wrinkles in the fabric at the time of exposure mimic the contours of an aerial landscape image as much as the radiating cracks of a dropped phone screen. In the way that technology requires so much of the body through attention and integration, and so much of the earth through resource extraction, Grenier foregrounds this inherent relationship of the digital to the human and natural worlds.

Thinking through broader concepts such as aging and obsolescence, consumption, connectivity, and consciousness, Grenier’s work in Crystal Gazers reconfigures ways of seeing electronics and digital images. In an architecturally mediated installation, he extends the limits of photography’s visual language and means of engagement. Both poetic and referential, this exhibition reactivates a sense of intentional, critical engagement within the omnipresent world of images.

Presented by Blouin Division