La légèreté des horizons
Éliane Excoffier
Bois-Franc Station
Artist: Éliane Excoffier
Éliane Excoffier, a visual artist based in Sutton, devotes her practice to contemporary photography. Her approach blends digital and analog processes, exploring the possibilities of technical experimentation. Her series unfold in meticulously staged scenes where settings, light and subjects intertwine, bringing to life enigmatic narratives imbued with materiality and sensuality.
About the work
Éliane Excoffier spent her adolescence only a few blocks away from today’s Bois-Franc Station. From her memories along the railroad emerged a series of nine photographs entitled La légèreté des horizons, presented in three sequences on separate walls of the station.
Together, the photographs offer passengers a paradoxical experience. Printed in large format on glass, they appear as open windows to the outside world, set within the heart of an underground space. Each image seeks to transcend the station’s physical boundaries through the presence of a feather, which, by virtue of its intrinsic lightness, draws the gaze upward.
The fragility of these elements lends the work a delicate, fleeting quality, revealing the vulnerability of what surrounds us while affirming particular attention to the preservation of living things. Depending on the sequence, the photographs evoke the breaking of dawn, Québec’s northern ethos or tall grass stirred by the wind.
In this way, they are in keeping with the artist’s approach, where light and matter serve as the guiding threads for a meditation on the visible and invisible, on what comes to the surface and what slips away.
“I envisioned this work as a visual breath, a moment of lightness within this space of transit. To bring these images into being, I gently placed feathers on a pane of glass, letting the landscape itself compose the background in its own natural way. The process unfolds entirely at the instant of capture, without recourse to photographic montage.”
