Nelly-Ève Rajotte is a professor at the School of Design at UQAM, where she leads the Moving Image and Sound Design research axis. A visual and media artist, she develops a practice rooted in immersive installation and performance that interrogates contemporary conditions of perceptual experience. Working with moving image and sound, her projects explore non-human regimes of vision and machinic forms of landscape imaging, drawing on technologies such as LiDAR, biosensors, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
Her research-creation is grounded in an inquiry into the sensitive relationships between technology, the body, and the environment, proposing immersive dispositifs that displace anthropocentric perspectives in favor of perceptual alterities and non-human points of view. Recognized for their monumental scale and immersive intensity, her works engage viewers in experiences that reconsider notions of presence, mediation, and cohabitation with technological and living systems.
Her work has been presented in numerous institutional and curatorial contexts in Quebec and internationally, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée d’art de Joliette, Contemporary Calgary, Emerson Contemporary (US), as well as Occurrence, Clark, Optica, and Circa. It has also been featured in major international festivals and events such as MUTEK (Montreal, Argentina, Mexico, and Japan), Transmediale (Berlin), the International Festival of Films on Art, the International Short Film Festival of Berlin, Lab30, ISEA, and the KIKK Festival (Belgium).
Her works are included in several public collections, including that of Hydro-Québec.
Multidisciplinary artist Nelly-eve Rajotte works at the confluence of performance, video and installation. Known among others for her monumental projections, Rajotte is interested in the sensory condition of the spectator experience. She investigates the relationship in space and probes the arborescence of physical sensations and psychological states registered through perception. In this sense, her joint work of image and sound reflects a certain alterity of representation and experience.
Around the recurring figure of the landscape, Rajotte takes a romantic approach where tension and opposition interplay with composition used to explore the building process of the images. She borrows from cinematographic strategies, editing effects and staging that not only transform, but aesthetize reality. The landscape is refined and fragile, and the landscape is thus asserted through the artist’s operations as a cultural object. Her sound accomplishes this unnatural shift of images, weaving around her some sort of atypical universe to the point anxiety. The acoustic environment doubles the sensory experience of the work by simultaneously conflicting and supporting the image’s narrative. These frames meet, repel each other and destabilize their reception, in sort, they challenge the heart of the work.
Her approach is distinguished by its clear interest in perception and she radicalizes its scope. This monitoring exercise is not motivated by technological devices, but by organizing an open environment on interpretation. Her compositions are like those of a painter working to augment the fundamental temporal dimension of an experience. Image and sound materialize in time, attract attention, registers in a given space and finally gives in to convey the full power of the work.