In her latest photography series, Estelle Lagarde juggles with the archetypes of fiction and representation, evoking theatre, cinema and literature and playing with our ambiguities, fears and instincts. Lagarde’s lighting is delicate and precise while the transparency is created by multiple exposure times. In her work, she continues to explore appearances and trompe-l’oeil illusions. Her photography is very openly staged, laced with humour and joyfully decrypts false appearances and the codes that govern our intimate or social history.
The people who have taken refuge in Estelle Lagarde’s strange Inn appear to come from somewhere out of time. As if an invisible link had drawn them all to this same place. Brought together, they compose an intriguing array of protagonists who hover between an offbeat reality and a materialised fictional world. There are a few clues to suggest that, in the end, this could merely be a surrealist farce.
But we are never really sure. The doubt lingers, in every image. What crime, great or small, what sin, minor or major, sent these characters to seek shelter in the Inn’s rooms or dining room?
What does the young bride and her unsettled gaze hide from her husband?
And what about the young boy, his hands together in prayer? What can he be confessing to?
Yet the most threatening and the most bizarre are not to be found in the bedrooms. If we move to the dining room, we are left wondering about the secrets the lady in the corner withholds? Dressed in black, she looks like she has stepped out of a Gaston Leroux novel.
And what strange dishes are served to the guests seated around the table? What syndrome pushes them to attempt cannibalism? is the meal of game no longer enough for them?
Paradoxically, it is perhaps the most poetic scenes, and not the most explicitly “terrifying”, that turn out to be the most disturbing.
Dare you join the guests at “The Inn”?
“The Inn” will be on show at Galerie Fontaine Obscure in Aix-en-Provence from 31 May to 11 June 2016 during the “La Photo se Livre” festival.
EXHIBITION
The Inn (L’auberge)
New photographic story by Estelle Lagarde
From April 17th to May 18th, 2016
Radial Art Contemporain
11b, Quai de Turckheim
67000 Strasbourg
France
[email protected]
http://www.radial-gallery.eu
http://www.estellelagarde.fr
Wednesday to Sunday 1pm – 7pm. Sunday 3pm – 6pm and by appointment.
