A PORTRAIT | VIRTUAL GALLERY
Sporobole is proud to present the youth exhibition Un portrait, created in collaboration with the student community at Mitchell-Montcalm high school during photography and sound creation workshops!
UN PORTRAIT | GALERIE VIRTUELLE
A PORTRAIT: FIRST AND FOREMOST A PROJECT¢
Seeking out the gaze of others while fearing it – isn’t this the cross a teenager must bear? Probably never since the invention of mirrors have young people had to worry so much about how they are perceived. Every cell phone is a camera, every place a potential stage set. And what about the community around them, are they loved ones or an audience ready to judge, thumbs up or thumbs down?
Of course, the passage from childhood to adulthood is always the advent of a social being that will last a lifetime. On the other hand, the ubiquity of today’s virtual space puts visual representation of the self at the center of our lives, for better or for worse. What about young people, whose self-affirmation seems conditional on their presence on small glass screens?
No one knows the long-term effects of this early preoccupation with self-representation. However, the prognosis for today’s teenagers is unequivocal: mental health problems are on the rise. The upheavals of recent years have certainly had something to do with it, but it seems that this was already a major trend. Why do our protected teenagers feel so many precipices all around them? Raised too high in their acute self-awareness, they’re probably afraid of heights…
In such a context, the role of art is not so much curative as exploratory. The Un portrait project aims to encourage young people to rethink the selfie. In collaboration with Sherbrooke artist-run center Sporobole, Cosimu, creator of the Fonofone digital tools, Mitchell-Montcalm high school and psychologist Nathalie Plaat, the project will culminate in an exhibition at Sporobole of pictorial and sound works created by the teenagers, as well as a virtual gallery.
Erik Beck, responsible for Sporobole’s educational programs, will first meet with a group of Secondary 4 students for four introductory photography workshops. Focusing on portraiture, the workshops will offer a variety of techniques to stimulate creativity. Next, Nathalie Plaat will present a lecture on image-related disturbances, self-staging and healthy narcissistic development. Her lecture will take the form of workshops in which the works under construction will be put to good use. The aim of the project is to create one or more black-and-white photographs of the young people’s portraits, printed in large format in the Sporobole workshops.
Afterwards, author and composer Benoît Côté, director of the Cosimu organization, will join musician Erik Beck to work on sound creation with the youngsters. Over three workshops, using the Fonofone application, teens will record sounds associated with their personalities, tastes and memories. Benoît will guide them in writing texts to be integrated into their work. Using the fonoimage application, they can then “sound” their portrait, bringing out the inner garden suggested and enclosed in the image. To reveal these sounds, they need to scan the portrait with their cursor or finger using an electronic tablet. Touching the face reveals the music.
At the end of the mediation, the portraits will be displayed on the walls of Sporobole; in front of each photo, an electronic tablet and headphones will give the public another perspective on the work, with the possibility of hearing what the teenager has created as a sound universe.
Source : Benoît Côté
Image : Shutterstock
