Nelly-Eve Rajotte is a professor at the School of Design of UQAM, where she heads the Moving Image and Sound Design axis. As a visual and media artist, her hybrid practice is particularly interested in moving images, sound, and immersion, through performance and installation. She is also a filmmaker, editor, and composer. In addition to numerous exhibitions in Quebec, including at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM), Fonderie Darling, Parisian Laundry, Occurrence, Clark, Optica, and Circa, her works have been shown in several festivals in Canada, including MUTEK, the International Festival of Films on Art, and Espace [IM] Media, as well as internationally – International Short Film Festival of Berlin (Germany), Transmediale (Germany), MUTEK (Argentina, Japan, and Mexico), Lab30 (Germany) , Finnish Contemporary Art Fair (Finland), and ISEA2020.
Her work is part of the Hydro-Québec Collection.
Using video and sound as her primary mediums, Nelly-Eve Rajotte operates at the confluence of performance, image, and installation. Recognized among other things for her monumental projections, Rajotte is interested in the sensitive conditions of the spectator experience. She explores the relationship to space and delves into the branching of physical sensations and psychological states inscribed in reception. Her combined work of image and sound reflects a certain alterity of representation and experience.
Around the recurring figure of the landscape, Rajotte adopts a romantic posture where tensions and oppositional plays of composition allow for the exploration of image construction processes. She borrows from cinematic strategies of editing and staging that not only transform but also aestheticize reality. Streamlined and fragile, the landscape thus asserts itself through the artist’s operations as a cultural object. The sound then accomplishes this “beyond nature” shift of the image by embroidering around it an almost anxiogenic atypical universe. The sound environment doubles the sensitive potential of the work by negating or exalting the discourse of the image. These threads respond to each other, push each other away, and destabilize the reception, ultimately placing it at the heart of the work.
Rajotte’s approach is distinguished by her manifest interest in perception, which she specifies and radicalizes the scope of. This exercise of control is not motivated by technological artifices, but rather by the organization of an environment open to interpretation. Her composition work then resembles that of a painter, augmented by a fundamental temporal dimension of experience. Time materializes the activity of the image and sound, captivates attention, places it in a given space, and finally consents to the senses full power over the work.