O Canada

The landscapes in Ô Canada are cut from an art book published in 1925 on the photographic work of Louis Hamilton about Canada. This book, found by chance and abandoned, was destined for recycling. The images, produced with a large-format camera, depict with strong contrasts a bygone era that unfolds page after page in narratives that are sometimes bucolic, sometimes wild. I reappropriated the visuals that called to me in order to reconstruct a new story—our own. The landscapes and figures in burnt sienna are composed of fragments from different Canadian provinces, while the figures in color come from France and look with a certain naïveté at their friends swimming or strolling along the beaches and shores of this new country.