Maroesjka Lavigne - Autobus, on the road - Archival pigment print ed di 5 - 2012 - 100x150cm
Maroesjka Lavigne
Born in Belgium, 1989
Lives and works in Ghent, Belgium
When you take a picture in a beautiful place, you have to realize that nature isn't the background for your photograph, rather, you are its prop. The only thing added to the scene, after all, is you. Yet rather than observing a poetic landscape of azure springs and silent snow, Lavigne's bold, cinematic images tell a tale of an out-of-the-ordinary everyday. Moments of unexpected familiarity jibe with unconquerable strangeness: a suburban street sleeps under rust-red night sky; an arctic fox perches unperturbed in slat-fenced Reykjavík backyard. White-capped mountain mounds bump against villages in a vision more akin to Candyland than Iceland, while half-melted snowmen form a small Stonehenge on a soccer field. Flights of fancy, however, are punctuated by Lavigne's haunting portraits of people met along the way—like characters in a silent film, they flicker between nostalgia and sudden, striking tangibility. And everywhere, always, are shades of white. Snow becomes an amorphous studio backdrop, indeterminate but infinitely malleable. It swallows ground and sky; coats buses, boats, and intrepid sight-seers; and then transforms again into a bleached sink basin, chalky house paint, and a plume of white steam. In Ísland the world may be pale, but life is anything but colorless.
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