Abstract
Quebec visual artist Isabelle Hayeur has become known internationally over the past decade for a body of photographic and video work that deals mostly in pseudorealistic landscapes of man-made desolation and devastation, created by the digital photomanipulation of visual evidence of the entropy generated by “development.” Collapsing time and space, cause and effect, visible power and its hidden costs in a single image, she subtly conflates seemingly contradictory aspects of industrial civilization (construction/destruction, spectacle/invisible, power/refuse) in deadpan epics of tragic irony characterized by a disenchanted sublime. Heidegger’s concept of the gigantic helps elucidate this paradox; his definition of modernity as “the conquest of the world as picture” is used here to understand the dark spectacle of its development in terms of the photographic medium itself in a sample of Hayeur’s work since 2008.
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