BACKGROUND 1912-2007, 2008
Digital chromogenic print mounted on plexiglas
56 x 88,5'' EACH
''The dates in Background I: 1912-2007 frame the lifespan of Italian film auteur Michelangelo Antonioni. The work is inspired by a scene in Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-up, where characters played by actresses Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills strip and wrestle with the film’s protagonist, the voyeuristic fashion photographer played by David Hemmings, on top of studio backdrop paper. The paper in Grandmaison’s image is packaging for a studio flash-kit, which he photographed unaltered after finding it in a mail-order box. Typical of his formally beautiful, meticulously constructed, optically uncanny works, this photograph combines his interests in popular culture with a fascination in the structure and tools of the photographic medium in ways that play with our sense of time, scale and opticality. Here his effortless melding of form and subject creates a suture between memory and chance.''
Reid Shier, PRESENTATION HOUSE GALLERY, VANCOUVER
