Artists

Simone Rochon

My focus as an artist lies in exploring landscapes, particularly those revealing nature in grandiose, idealized and mysterious forms. This romanticized interpretation compels my efforts to go beyond a purely visual representation of place. Such an approach—both more traditional and poetic—is inevitably altered by our relationship to our environment. It brings me to reflect on the constant changes in our surroundings, and how these changes affect our understanding of them.

The pace of these transformations leads me to examine the narrative possibilities of a landscape, without necessarily referencing a specific or credible geographic location. Attention is given to the morphology of the landscape, as a means of developing this notion of a place being continuously reinvented. The narrative I seek emerges as a result of visual relationships and tensions between the space and its geographical or architectural structures.

I deliberately combine natural and artificial aspects of a landscape, giving them each other’s characteristics. I am interested in utopias, unpopulated places whose features may reference astronomy, cartography, meteorology or architecture. Strange constructions, existing somewhere between artificial object and natural form, are repeated or superimposed, giving a temporal quality to the hypothetical geographical spaces they occupy.

I question my relationship with nature, keeping in mind the subjectivity of my perceptions and those of others. As an artist, I attempt to faithfully record these perceptions. They take in a wide range, from what is fabricated to what is not; from what was, to what it is becoming.