Laurene Bois-Mariage, Untitled, 8" x 13" diasec print

French, b. 1981, playing from Helsinki, Finland

I am a French artist presently living and working both in Estonia and Finland. I first received art education in Fine Arts to later graduate as Master of Arts from l´Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Photographie in Arles. I have developed since then my work through photographic medium, focusing on its specificities while tending to extend its possibilities to the ones of sculpture and installation.

Today I am particularly interested in collective practices of photography, in its new contexts of production and diffusion, as well as in its place within social media. My recent works start where photography is omnipresent, making an exclusive use of visuals gleaned on media. In regard to the present ever-growing, hyper-accessible stream of images which we all are familiar with, which we all contribute to, I keep on recycling and favor pictures editing versus taking.

As witness of current changes, my work deals with questions that arise from them and expands through several lines. Here it highlights the very physical importance of photographic tools from camera obscura to smartphone, and experiences the dematerialization of photographic image from its being plate to its being file. There, it correlates an increasingly easy access to pictures with the increase of relative legal restrictions. Elsewhere, it reconsiders the validity of boundaries distinguishing between amateur, art and professional photography.

Photography can eventually be more a subject than the medium in which I work. I regularly present group and solo exhibitions, am the recipient of multiple distinctions and participate to various cultural events, internationally.

www.laureneboismariage.weebly.com laureneboismariage@yahoo.fr

Thoughts on the Telephone process

It is much interesting how Telephone plays with the very possibilities brought forth by actual communication and social media. Participating in Telephone, I felt both very honored and very humble, trying to balance my extreme respect for the work of the writing artist that I have been offered to translate, with my will to give the best of my own, while never forgetting about the responsibility for what has to be transmitted. This experience gave me an opportunity to disturb the way I used to work, that is necessarily alone; it arose questions relative to the share of heritage, authorship and transmission within creative process.

Above all, it has been fun and I have been very excited the whole time, thrilled always and impatient about discovering the work of us all in its totality.