Éliane Excoffier

Nightlife
May 23, 2018 to June 30, 2018

Éliane Excoffier brings us Nightlife, a new exhibition comprising two separate groups of works: one featuring fourteen black-and-white nighttime photographs, and the other seven large photos in colour. The black-and-white images come from three game cameras placed in a wooded area. Excoffier set them up—initially, just out of curiosity—to learn more about the animal activity around her home once night fell. Activated automatically when they detected movement, the cameras captured almost ghostly images of the animals’ silhouettes moving in the darkness. Using the thousands of images she gathered in this way over the period of a year and a half, the artist presents us with a fantastical nocturnal world. 

The second group is made up of pictures of deer carcasses found on the edge of a forest. Intrigued by the beauty of such macabre scenes, through these photographs of animal bodies in various stages of decomposition Excoffier provides an imagined reconstruction of a piece of natural history. 

The exhibition represents a continuation of Éliane Excoffier’s work. The ghostly appearance of bodies in motion has been a recurrent theme in her art since the 1990s, while presentations of animals began in 2015, with her series Fables

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