| Société de ville comprises a series of large-format black and white photographs of urban wilderness; the pockets and fringes of uncultivated plant life that one finds in the margins of city environments. Here Benoit has reversed a device commonly associated with Canadian landscape painting: the screen of trees. Historically, Canadian artists have tended to present the wilderness as inaccessible and forbidding, a feeling often created by presenting some awesome feature of the landscape, such as a mountain peak, warded off by a screen of impenetrable trees. In Benoit’s photographs, the mountains have been replaced with the looming, almost-Gothic architecture of the city. The viewer now peers out from the tattered, yet insistent remains of the forest, like the member of some alternative society (société) forced to take refuge in the undergrowth.
Text by Emily Falvey for Canadian Art |
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