Exposition Boomtown Holy Void de Marie-Raphaëlle LeBlond à Manif d’art
Complexe Méduse
The state of our built heritage expresses a deep and hard-to-define malaise, the scars of which our regions bear. With Boomtown Holy Void, Marie-Raphaëlle LeBlond takes an oblique look at the last great colonization effort in North America: Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Northern Ontario, the ultimate Canadian "frontier land." Between 2020 and 2023, she traveled through dozens of abandoned sites—disused mines, ruined churches, ghost towns—scattered along the Cadillac Fault. The resulting photographic series, influenced by her documentation of the arsenic crisis in Rouyn-Noranda in 2022, questions the genesis of our living spaces, our relationship to the territory, and the impact of exploitation mentalities on the rural landscape. The installation presented in the window extends this reflection through a play of thresholds and superpositions. It blurs the boundaries between image and matter, interior and exterior, fiction and trace. Conceived as a transitional space with disturbed landmarks, it is traversed by a persistent idea of loss. The complete series is the subject of an artist's book, Boomtown Holy Void: Épigraphie de la ville jetable, published in September 2025. Sponsored by VU, this project was made possible with the support of the Première Ovation program. This site uses cookies to improve your browsing experience. For more details, or to see how to disable these cookies, please consult our data protection policy.
Art / Gallery
Free