Imaginary Landscapes
BFA Exhibition- Rachelle Soucy
Video/Sculpture/Instillation

Do you remember a place like a photograph in your mind? How do you remember a specific place? Do certain sensations remind you of a place or time?



For the last few years the majority of my concentration has been to incorporate cityscape themes into my artwork. These images have taken shape from fanciful chaotic images inspired from the larger cityscape to more of a tranquil quality inspired by my new surroundings. I commenced my work on a two-dimensional plane, but I wanted more of an interactive feel, as our everyday environments have. I questioned whether a two-dimensional image was actually a realistic or natural representation. The time of day or human interaction can change a landscape’s shape dramatically. Both human and natural elements play off each other creating a mutating landscape.

This constant changing of aesthetics in real time gives the landscape a dynamic quality. I incorporated this notion into the formation of my interactive sculpture. There are geometric and organic shapes coming out from the wall creating an interactive backdrop for the projected video. The video images act as both kinetically and as visual sensations. As a visual artist, I choose the sense of sight to invoke memories of time and place, through the use of texture, motion and colour. Memories of a place are not necessarily like a photograph in your mind, but you are often reminded through sensations:

“The sense of place…does indeed emerge from the senses. The land and even the spirit of the place, can be experienced kinetically, or kinesthetically, as well as visually. If one has been raised in a place its textures and sensations, its smells and sounds, are recalled as they to a child’s, adolescent’s, adult’s body. Even if one’s history there is short, a place can still be felt as an extension of the body, especially the walking body, passing through and becoming part of the landscape.”

I have intended both geometric and organic forms to represent more than what they are. They form a sort of map making, similar to topography, representing three-dimensional natural and built formations. They can also represent other technological and organic elements that the viewer is familiar with.

This is an interactive landscape of the physical and visual attributes of places that I am familiar with and pass through daily, but this is not a representational landscape. It is a means to invoke personal memories of place for both myself and for others, through feelings and ideas people attach to certain sensations.



Lucy R. Lippard. Being in Place. New York: The New Press, 1997. p. [34]

Ever wanted to visit La Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris? Here is a link to a 3-D virtual tour of the graveyard and visit such grave sites as Ingres, Descartes, Corot, David, Delacroix, Ernst, Morrison, Chopin, Seurat, Gericault, Wilde and so on.

This is how I remember the cemetery and other places in France:

09.08.97
L’ile d’Aix

This tiny island reminds me of my grandmother’s home and yard, vulnerable from all sides, its homes chipped and worn from the ocean winds. It has a natural charm decorating-type magazines seek to imitate. Hollyhocks, hundreds upon hundreds are sagging from fences and homes, and swaying, and reaching out sideways. Their bright fleshy tones for petals, pinks and blood reds ready to blossom, burst out, flowing forward-my tongue reaches for the taste this season brings. We sat on a patio made of stones, sunk deep into the dirt. I satisfied my thirst on a sugary mixture of Orangina and grenadine and played with the tiny sugar cubes wrapped in paper packaging imprinted with pictures of great cathedrals. This island’s colour is sweetness, and so pretty it hurts the eye like a sweet tooth.

10.08.97
Mass and Market

It was a very quick family trip to both mass and market today. In both venues, everyone is free to come and go. You can come just long enough to secure either your salvation or sustenance


18.08.97
Soirées Mousse

If I were to describe this evening using paint, I’d blow liquid paint through straws, effecting splatters all over my paper, and let it dry with my saliva bubbles. It was a sadistic evening, where the bar staff filled the dance floor with foam every half hour to the anthem “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” by U2. Big black shiny tubes pumped and churned out soapsuds, filling the room foot by foot until it was high above our heads. I was drowning on soap as I sputtered and flailed my arms, but to others it must have looked like a dance of complete elation.

20.08.97
French movies

We had a quiet evening watching movies. We watched the entire Godfather series in French dubbed voices. As well as the movie Cocktail, starring Tom Cruise. I am amazed at what a dubbed voice does to change a person’s personality. Tom Cruise’s character now seems halfhearted to me, yet to Marie he is very passionate.

29.08.97
La Père Lachaise

The man at the gate sold us a map of the cemetery,so we could find our way easier to famous grave sites, such as Chopin, Descartes, Ingres and Jim Morrison. We still got lost in a maze of stones and immense vegetation. Paths leading to paths that led to nowhere, but back to the path we were on. Instead we found the enshrined tombs buried in letters, flowers and candles - as markers of the most cherished grave sites.

30.08.97
Les Catacombes

We descended spiral stairs down and down into the bowels of the city. It was literally the intestines of Paris, where sewage lines leaked and seeping green ooze dripped down above our heads into the tunnels. The tour guide suggested using umbrellas if we had brought them along with us. This is where they once emptied old Parisian cemeteries to solve problems of overpopulation and space. Stacks of human bones and skulls lined the walls of the passages. It was a subterranean “Day of the Dead” in the gut of Paris, and I wondered if the souls of the dead had returned and were all around us now.