Photography: Jérôme Nadeau
Montreal-based artist Jérôme Nadeau, MFA 16, describes his images as “indexical traces of themselves. Two mirrors facing each other, infinitely reflecting themselves.”
Nadeau was the recipient of the Roloff Beny Foundation Fellowship in Photography in 2014. The $10,000 fellowship is awarded yearly by the Concordia Department of Studio Arts’ photography program to a graduate student for his or her outstanding artistic and academic achievement. In 2013 Nadeau also won a Mildred Lande and Margot Lande Graduate Scholarship in Photography.
Jérôme Nadeau is founder of soon.tw, a contemporary art gallery and publishing platform dedicated to the production of artists' books, monographs and multiples.
The Roloff Beny Fellowship allows a student to pursue a photography project shown at a later date. Nadeau will exhibit the first instalment of his resulting work, Quiet Qualms, in spring 2017 at the artist space REPENTLESS in Montreal.
Nadeau explains that Quiet Qualms was inspired by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. He used the fellowship funds to record video footage at the Borges Labyrinth of the Cini Foundation in Venice, Italy, and two other Italian labyrinths in May 2016. “Exploring mazes as unknown fields of incidences, I want to represent reality as an indecipherable, inescapable mesh,” Nadeau says.
Quiet Qualms
In the multi-channel video installation Quiet Qualms, “The camera follows a lover, seemingly distant, roaming around, seeking exit,” he writes. “Looking for something that can’t be found, a void, nothingness.”
Nadeau appreciates the creative hothouse atmosphere of Concordia’s photography program. “It was a stimulating environment,” he says. “The ongoing conversation with professors and peers was precious.”