AN ENCHANTING HOUR AND A HALF ALL TO MYSELF

Our annual outing with Anne, is usually to Versailles. If you have read my chapter on the excursion this year, you may well understand why Anne was not enthusiastic. She had reason to avoid it.  A few weeks later after I had seen the Olafur Eliasson with Jerome and Laurent, Anne had left a message for me to say that a 15-minute video by a Canadian Artist at their cultural centre in Paris was definitely worth the visit. I looked at the photo and then onto the home page and nothing provoked an enthusiasm to go and see Michele Lemieux. We were in the middle of a heat-wave and everyone was feeling limp. One morning I gave myself a hard kick and said, « stop it, get out and see something ». Looking at my list there was nothing I really wanted to see. I would be seeing the last exhibition of the summer at Saint Pierre with Laurent the following week….Oh well, let’s trot off to the Canadian Cultural centre. 

And my goodness, am I glad I did.

 Michèle Lemieux / The whole and its parts. From Drawings to Animated Films


The work of Michèle Lemieux, illustrator of children’s books, animated filmmaker and educator, proposes a reflection on the representation of reality, time and the human condition. The exhibition The Whole and Its Parts: From Drawings to Animated Films invites the viewer to discover the visual experimentations, working methods and aesthetic of an exceptional artist, the director of films, the latest of which, Here and the Great Elsewhere, was produced at the National Film Board of Canada between 2010 and 2012 with a remarkable instrument, the pinscreen, invented in France by the filmmakers Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker during the 1930s.
The images of the pins, shadows projected onto a white surface, are ephemeral. A fixed camera photographs each drawing, and then transmits it to a computer, which records the successive images produced by the tiny changes made to the support. Very malleable, the pin screen naturally lends itself to morphing one image into another but within the confines of a fixed frame. The exhibition aims to show the demands this screen of 240,000 black steel pins makes on its user and the metaphysical questions that it raises.

I have taken this directly from their Home Site. Before leaving to go, I had read the French version and as I said, it didn’t really do anything for me. Once I was there and began looking at the different presentations on iPads and then reading her children’s book « Nuit d’Orage » « Night of the Storm ». I was in enchantment land. I don’t really think that for the « Nuit d’Orage » English is needed. The sketching itself and animation are a delight. To be perfectly honest, as children we asked all those questions « where do we come from » « where are we going »….Think of the questions you asked, they will be here. Once back home, I ordered the book at once on Amazon?


One of the dreams....









Here she is describing her work

Michele Lemieux


Then upstairs to see the video

The Video

This too has an extraordinary grace. Perhaps melancholy could describe certain scenes. These are the pin images that she worked on. I was so glad to see it again on YouTube

Here is a selection of her drawings. There was a lot more to take and when I go back before the exhibition finishes with Pierre, I will do so.



For one of her books


Don't you feel like this at times?







The Good and the Bad

























Can you read the text?


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Michael Keane a dit…
I really love these images.
12/9/16 10:43
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