centre d'artistes.artist run centre
Catherine Bodmer is a visual artist whose practice includes installation, photography and site-specific work. The idea of transformation is at the centre of her work, as well as the observation of the ordinary and banal aspects of life, which she seeks to infuse with a supplementary dimension. In her installations and site-specific works, she is mostly interested in activities related to cleaning the body and the space. Stressing the ambivalent values of cleanliness and purity, she questions their effects on the arrangement of our physical and mental spaces, our ideologies and utopias. More recently, Catherine Bodmer has been working with the means of photography to explore the space of the image and the imagination. Her attention has been drawn to places that evoke a sense of openness and speculation, but also of precariousness. For the artist, a place as much as an image represents a combination of variables where nothing remains stable. Comparable to the malleable materials in her installations, she conceives of the image as a “matter” that can be transformed. The manipulation of pixels, the alteration of certain elements in the image, as well as strategies of multiplication and variation of a subject serve a broader idea that highlights our existence’s vulnerability in relation with an increasingly complex and kaleidoscopic understanding of reality.
Originally from Switzerland, Catherine Bodmer has a degree from the School of Art of Lucerne in Switzerland and earned a master’s degree in visual arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1999. Over the last ten years, she has been actively involved in artist-run centres and was the artistic coordinator at La Centrale/Powerhouse Gallery (1999-2002) and at articule (2004-2009) in Montreal. Her art practice includes installations, site-specific works and photography that have been presented in several individual and group exhibitions throughout Canada, as well as in Mexico and Taiwan. In 2008, she received the Duke and Duchess of York Prize of Photography of the Canada Council for the Arts, and in 2010, she participated in an art residency in Mexico City supported by the Studio-Residency Programme of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Image: Catherine Bodmer, de la série Churusbusco, 2010
Ink jet print, 54cm x 54 cm