BIO Upon completing her university studies, Jennifer Alleyn travelled the world, camera in hand, with the television program La Course Destination Monde. Later, she won the International Confederation of Arthouse Cinemas (C.I.C.A.E.) award at the Cannes film festival with the film Cosmos. At the same time, she was developing a visual arts practice which incorporates video, photography and installation. The first exhibition of her work, an installation, took place in 2011 at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts as part of the group exhibition Big Bang. In 2018 she released her first feature-length film, Impetus, which joins cinéma-vérité and fiction.
ARTISTIC PRACTICE A multimedia artist, filmmaker and author, Jennifer Alleyn draws on her dual background in university-level studies in cinema and visual art to create works of art which enter into dialogue with the medium. Trained in documentary filmmaking, she incorporates archiving, preservation and inspection in her work in order to transcend the poetic idea. Over the course of her artistic investigations there develops a perceptible framework for exploring the state of being and what makes it act. Her visual art derives from a constant gleaning of images and words to convey the paradoxical collision between human, profound and transformative experience and the inability to put it into words.
PROJECT With Catalogue des traces, Jennifer Alleyn extends her exploration of loss and grief by turning to what survives. Using interviews with new arrivals, she has established a list of “objects left behind.” These everyday objects are the bearers of memory yet are now inaccessible. Her project seeks to recreate these objects in the form of a curiosity cabinet. Alleyn will invite the residents of the Charlevoix region to identify an object on the list for which they can find an equivalent in their home and to lend it to her so that she can include it in the installation. Audio capsules containing the stories of new arrivals and Charlevoix residents around the abandoned object add to the visual element of the installation. Provoking an intercultural encounter around these familiar and ordinary objects will provide a glimpse of opportunities for enriching exchanges.
