Fossilization of fragments VII - Limited Edition of 5 Print

Diane Lafontaine is a contemporary visual artist and architect (www.dianelafontaine.ca) who works in Montreal and the Laurentians. She has been involved in independant research, reflection, creation and production of visuals arts, architecture and design for more than twenty five years. Her works are built of a large range of mixed elements taken directly from her daily environment. Her pictorial works take form by the use of newspaper clippings, advertising posters founded in garbage containers, images taken out of ancient volumes, photographs of her own sculptural works and abandoned items and fragments of hand-made paper which she pasters, photographs, scans, digitally modify with software, and transfers on paper, using the most recent technologies of impression. Carried out throughout the late 1980’s to the late 1990’s, her installations consist of fragments of utility items (sewing machine machine mechanism, clothesline pully), of architectural vestiges (parts of doors, windows and lathing) and of her pictorial works which she integrate in structure made of steel, wood,glass, plastic. By taking fragments, she retrieves whatever falls in her line of vision, is abandoned, discarded, or would not ordinarily retain anyone’s attention. She assembles, superposes, juxtaposes, in order to create new entities that appeal to the imaginary. The final result is an hybrid work, amalgamating manual, mechanical and numerical processes. In the same way, her architectural (and urban design) works, deeply anchored in their context, are conceived from elements retrieved from the scene of intervention (imprints, vestiges, ruins) from traces of the past (historical maps, ancient photographs and narratives), of natural elements of the site, and are elaborate by way of a pictorial and sculptural approach of space, in which forms, colours, textures, shadows and light, interclash, forming an harmonious whole, uncluttered and stripped of all artifices. Born and raised in the Ottawa region where she obtained a diploma in Applied arts from Algonquin College, she moved in Montreal in her early twenties and worked as interior designer. After two years of interior design practice, she went back to school and received a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Université de Montréal with complementary studies in visuals arts where she studied under architects and artists Melvin Charney, Allan Knight, Irena Latek, Pierre Granche and Jocelyn Jean.