PIERRE DALPÉ

Dates of residency:  November till December  2015 
Born: 1964
Nationality: Canadian
Lives and works: Montreal, Canada
Education: 
1993 BFA in Film Studies and Photography, Concordia University
Selected shows:
2020 Wigstock, Gaffa Gallery, Sydney
2018 Face 2.0, Ekaterinburg Museum of Fines Arts, Ekaterinburg
2015 Role-Play, Arbor Gallery, Vankleek Hill, Ontario
2014 Personae, Gaffa Gallery, Sydney

THE ARTIST
Pierre Dalpé is a Montreal-based photography and video artist. Dalpé’s work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Russia, Mexico, United Kingdom, Australia, and the Middle East. His photographs are part of many private collections, and have been published in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and periodicals. In 2012 Les Editions Cayenne published a monograph entitled Personae, spanning 20 years of Dalpé's photographic practice. He is the recipient of numerous grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. He has participated in artist-in-residence programs at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, The Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec’s studio residency in Mexico City.

THE RESIDENCY
Dalpé’s work explores the interconnected relationships between the body, identity, disguise and performance. Navigating between documentary and staged scenarios, his work questions preconceived notions about photographic portraiture and narrative representations. While at BAR, Dalpé continued producing images for his Personae series: environmental portraits started in 1997, involving a collaborative process where the artist allows his subjects to exorcise their alter egos by performing an invented scenario, or narrative, within the proscenium arch of his camera frame. During his residency he also continued his ongoing project of capturing portraits of mannequins in shop windows. The depicted window settings exude a dreamy, surreal quality; the mannequins seem to be frozen in their own decisive moment, exuding a strange combination of defiance, confidence, vulnerability, and serenity.