Plastic experimentation pictures of Anne-Claire Vimal du Monteil explore the transformation of reality, its reinvention. Feeling and emotion take precedence over the precise representation of the subject.
Reality is distorted or blurred through all kind of real-life filters. Poetic images emerge, telling a different story than just plain captured reality. It can also lead to reveal a hidden meaning through the creative process.
In Urban Vegetation series, Anne-Claire Vimal du Monteil captures various manifestations of plants during her strolls in Montreal. Man made structures and vegetal matter create poetic images through her lens. Her initial goal is to extract beauty from plain day to day life.
There are two distinct parts in this series. The first one focuses on all forms of vegetal life in the city: sidewalks, urban gardens and lawns.
The second one showcases indoor plants seen from the outside : the ones we can see through private windows or stores displays. We present here a selection of pictures from this second part. These pictures relate to both plastic and aesthetic research of the artist. The physical separation between the plant and the photographer creates pictorial compositions with glass reflection and dirt, mosquito nets, see-through curtains.
In addition, the artist questions modern western human’s domination over nature in order to understand how the plants can feel this confinement. Green empathy. We call them indoor plants, indeed they don’t have any contacts with the outer world. They don’t feel the wind nor the weather. Their roots are disconnected from their natural ecosystem and their fellow creatures. They live in a sanitized environment, owned by their master who controls their survival and breeding. We created this artificial relation of dependency between those plants and ourselves, just like with our pets.
What can they feel without a nervous system? How can we learn from their behaviors to make our anthropocentrism evolve into a balanced and respectful relationship?
About Anne-Claire Vimal du Monteil
Anne-Claire Vimal du Monteil has been living in Montreal for the past 11 years. She worked in culture and cinema in Paris and then chose to become a high end retoucher and commercial photographer 13 years ago. In 2016, she transitioned to fine art photography and developed her research with different techniques and expressions within the medium. [Official Website]
