FLOAT
Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge
Megan Metté
Virtual Art Exhibition
December 10th, 2020 - March 13th, 2021
* Includes audio
Mirabo Press is pleased to announce Float, a virtual exhibition by Western New York artists Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge and Megan Metté. Both Leblanc-Roberge and Metté use photography and other media to reframe our perception of physical spaces. Through careful placement in Mirabo’s gallery space, varied hanging techniques, and a curated video tour of the installation, Float highlights fortuitous associations between the artists’ works and enlivens the online exhibition format. The exhibition is accompanied by a special edition of hybrid inkjet/photo etching intaglio prints created by Mirabo Press in collaboration with the artists.
Describing the exhibition, the artists say:
We are fascinated and compelled by ambiguous spaces. We are suspended between expectations and reality, suspended in a time between times. We imagine trajectories in the spaces around us. Gradually, we discover details and detours through repositioning and reframing. Small acts redefine our presence and experience in the space. Time passes. Time presses. We float in a space where answers become questions.
Our two bodies of work merge into one installation. Images in conversation with images. Their placement in the space illuminates previously unseen connections. Chair speaks to tupperware speaks to houseplant speaks to corner. Our minds are free to explore the network of associations.
Please join us for a virtual artist talk on December 16th during which Leblanc-Roberge and Metté will share their work and installation processes. Mirabo will also be presenting some of the processes involved in making limited edition, collaborative prints with the Leblanc-Roberge and Metté, which will be available in our web store.
* Full-screen mode is not available
About the artists
Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge was born in a small francophone coastal village in eastern Canada. She received her BFA in photography from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and her MFA in electronic integrated arts at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art and Lens Based Media at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York.
At the center of Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge’s artistic practice are images, usually taken with a camera, printed, projected, on screens, bounded in a book, sent by mail, wrapped around objects, or carefully placed in a room. Her projects generally involve acts of close observation of the physical spaces she (and/or her collaborators) inhabit. How we appropriate, occupy and mark the structures we live and work in are questions she investigates through her projects. She is compelled and fascinated by the ways in which attention (or lack thereof) leads to consequential (or subtle) shifts in perception at the level of the everyday. She incorporates trompe l’oeil and camouflage techniques, double-takes and shifting point of views as a method for destabilizing. Her projects often weave together personal narratives, fictions, coincidences and an awareness of the absurd
Born in Florida and raised in Louisville, KY, Megan Metté holds an MFA in Imaging Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and a BFA in Photography from the University of Louisville. She is the Art New York Program and River Campus Gallery Manager at the University of Rochester, where she also teaches photography and other courses. Currently based in Buffalo, NY, Megan has curated several exhibitions for CEPA Gallery’s Big Orbit Project Space and enjoys fostering collaborations across artistic disciplines.
Megan Metté uses lens-based imagery to question our expectations of ideal environments and the things that we do to feel in control. Constantly interrogating her surroundings and making realizations along the way, she explores the space between the beautiful and the unsettling, the real and the fantastic, the nightmare and the daydream. Using the frame to embrace these contradictions, she reclaims the spaces and things around her, creating abstract canvases for our contemplation and making inert surfaces come to life.