Our urban landscape is transforming at an unprecedented rate, yet our ability to understand or to even recognize this change is unnervingly difficult. Mason Journal recently had a chance to speak with Isabelle Hayeur, a visual artist who attempts to bring awareness to the radically fragmented environment that we inhabit. Isabelle discusses with us what sparked her interest in urban landscapes, how we occupy our current environment, and where this growth is leading us.

Mason Journal: Can you describe what lead your interest towards investigating our urban landscape and the impact that industrial development has on the interaction with our surroundings?

Isabelle Hayeur: I have always been concerned by the transformations that landscapes undergo. Growing up in a suburb, I was faced with the spectacle of urban sprawl and the disappearance of so many things in its path. My approach is tied to this experience and draws from discourses surrounding environmental issues such as land use planning. I am particularly interested in feelings of alienation, uprootedness, and dislocation.

Industrial development has created many disenchanted and inhospitable spaces. The world is bulldozed forward by technological advance and is undergoing an unprecedented rate of change. Many aspects of our existence are entrenched by an underlying structure of corporate materialism. Our current governance of earth just creates more no man’s land. This is a reality not only for us but also for all other living species on the planet. As a consequence of this lack of vision, the more we manipulate the earth, the more dehumanized it appears.

MJ: What is the importance for us as viewers to recognize, review and understand the manufactured landscape that we experience on a daily basis?

IH: The spaces in which we live now show clear evidence of the rapid pace and multiplicity of changes that have occurred over the past century. Our natural, rural and urban environments have undergone dramatic upheavals, particularly in the past 30 or 40 years. The highly mediatized world in which we live surrounds us with abstract spaces and manufactured environments. Our perceptions are inhabited by aspects of a technical culture that transforms, condenses and re-directs them toward a world that is increasingly constructed and orchestrated.

The current landscape is a coming together of radically different and often contradictory spaces. This fragmentation of the landscape closely parallels the compartmentalization of our activities and time. For us, this ever-more fragmented territory has become familiar, and we often traverse it without awareness. On a daily basis, especially those who commute from the suburbs, experience this dislocation without seeing it because driving a car tends to link everything that is disconnected in reality.

MJ: The environment in which we experience in an urban context is changing at an extraordinarily rapid rate due to the proliferation of high-rise residential complexes and a ‘condominium-living’ lifestyle. How do you see our interaction with the landscape changing with this particular urban development?

IH: I think the most dramatic change is the displacement and relocation of the working class that this ‘condominium-living’ lifestyle and gentrification tends to lead to. By increasing property values in a neighbourhood they force lower-income people to sell their dwellings and to move to another community. Also, these residential complexes are usually standardized and homogenous; they sometimes even convey suburban characteristics. They bring uniformity and conformity and tend to eliminate architectural and cultural specificity. They bring more consumerism and automobile-dependent lifestyle in cities. In this sense, high-rise complexes can isolate people from their city.

In Toronto, these residential developments are blocking the view of Lake Ontario keeping it for those in a higher-income bracket. These condos are being sold at higher prices because of their exclusive access to “the view”. By associating economical values to landscapes you reduce them to a commodity and you alienate them from their essential nature.

MJ: There is a prominent emergence of technological and virtual environments that many of us immerse ourselves on a daily basis; sometimes more so than our physical environment. Do you see parallels in your work with this virtual architecture?

IH: A new space is gradually being engineered today, one that is inextricably confounding reality and fiction. I try to highlight this phenomenon in my work but also to play with it. In my earlier works, like the Uncertain Landscapes series, I use digital photomontage to show what we don’t see in our artificial spaces by confronting dreamscapes with disenchanted spaces in the same image. In the Model Homes series, I try to highlight our usage of counterfeit cultural values, postmodern pastiches and synthetic construction material. By creating a hyper reality that reveals the fake and the absurd, I am hoping to show the misrepresentation of these manufactured spaces. I use the digital illusion to highlight the fabricated “lies” that we encounter in reality.

MJ: How do you see your work evolving with the seemingly more and more dramatic and rapid changes that are occurring in our manufactured environments? .

IH: In the recent years, I have been trying to photograph our environments from an unfamiliar vantage point, eschewing capture from shoulder height. These views from the inside create a relation of closeness between the onlooker and the site being documented. They take us closer to these environments by plunging us in their midst, as it were. By doing so, I am trying to break away from our usual ways to look at lands. I am asking these environments: if you could speak or if you could show us your point of view, what would it be?

MJ: Can you describe your studio space and how it influences your work?

IH: I rent a live/work industrial loft. My studio is relatively small because I work mostly with computers; I need more an office space than a proper studio. With the years, the various virtual tools that I use (websites, Vimeo, Facebook, Picasa Web Albums) have become extensions of my real studio space. I use them more and more for experimentation; not just to display my work or for networking. This virtual studio space has an increasing influence on my art and my physical studio space tends to be only a practical space.

MJ: From your experience, how would you describe the Canadian visual art community as compared to an international field?

IH: A strength of the Canadian art scene is the freedom you have as an artist because you are not as reliant on the market. In Canada, you have access to grants that give you the freedom to experiment and create – and let’s fight to keep it that way in the future. That said, I think the art market plays also an important role here. We have some good art dealers that share common visions with the art community.

The artists-run centers, which to some extent can be compared to the German Kunstvereins, is an excellent platform. We have also great public galleries and museums. In other art scenes, like France for example, it can be more difficult to start a career because you usually need to be introduced by someone; social hierarchy still prevails there. The peer-jury review committee that we have in Canada is a good democratic selection process.

The weakest point would be that it tends to be more difficult after the mid-career here. The Canadian art scene is relatively small and we are still isolated from four closest neighbours because there are many interactions with the American art scene. I think we are even a little bit more secluded in Quebec because of cultural and language specificity. We could have more exchanges with France, Belgium and Swiss, but distance makes it difficult. I would like to clarify something here: it is not solely a matter of “career” but also of art practice. When you are invited to participate to high-calibers events with good curators it has an impact on the way you make art and it can gives you the opportunity to make enhanced projects.

MJ: Can you tell us what other projects you have on the horizon and what we can look forward to seeing from you?

IH: I am currently working on a series of photographs depicting underwater landscapes titled Underworlds. The first images from this new body of work are on view at Division Gallery in Montreal until October 1st, 2011. I will also be included in the next edition of Nuit Blanche in Toronto. I have been working with curator Shirley Maddil to create a site-specific video installation at the Metropolitan United Church on Queen Street East. I am then planning to work on a new single-channel video.

For more information on Isabelle Hayeur and her work, visit www.isabelle-hayeur.com

Isabelle’s work can currently be seen at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s photography exhibition, “Songs of the Future: Canadian Industrial Photographs, 1858 to Today.”

 

All images courtesy of the artist:
Fire with Fire, site-specific project, 3 channels video installation created for the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, 2010.
Jade, Model Homes series, Collection of Art Gallery of Ontario, 2004, 43″ X 62″
Roxane (Ou l’attente de l’aube), 2004, Model Homes series, 43″ X 62″
Port Richmond, Underworlds series, 2011, 40″ X 36″
Chemical Coast 02, 2011, Underworlds series, 51″ X 72″
Pleasance, Uncertain Landscapes series, 33″ X 152″, 2003