Catherine Bolduc’s installations invite visitors to experience fantastic, playful spaces in which the banal is frequently stylised, transforming it into something miraculous. Striking mirror effects, coloured light, flashing stroboscopes or just the sheer accumulation and illumination of glittering baubles create wonderful, ephemeral fantasy worlds so fragile that they evade physical assimilation.
In Studio 3, Catherine Bolduc has created an expansive installation with flashes of light that seep from a hidden core, perceptible through the perforated wall of the apparently closed-in space. The tiny holes blink enticingly like imitations of mysterious stellar constellations in a dark night sky. But the flashing of stroboscopes becomes intolerable when one approaches closer and the sound – reminiscent of thunder – from the inside prevents viewers from immersing themselves in this alluring fantasy world, causing it to collapse instead like a house of cards. For the first time, Bolduc has integrated a video projection into her work: it shows the artist making various attempts – all doomed to failure – to overcome earth’s gravity or to penetrate the fog that conceals the passionately longed-for ‘somewhere else’.