Emotion and Reaction: Film and Media Art by Charlotte Clermont
Dream Less (Super 8 film still)
Charlotte Clermont is a Canadian sound and video artist. In her current practice, Charlotte investigates ideas about the passage of time and our experience of it, often using analogue recording devices and collaborating with fellow artists to showcase her subject matter through a lens of emotion and reaction.
There’s a subdued, quiet quality to Charlotte’s entire portfolio -- one that asks the viewer to examine their own feelings and responses to the visual and aural content presented, rather than being given any definite clues or pre-scripted entry points. The artist’s works do the interesting work of creating abstraction out of a medium that has an inherent bias toward the documentary.
Recent works, like 2020’s Dream Less, use a combination of surreal, fragmented visuals and unfamiliar, even slightly eerie soundtracks to build up an overall atmosphere of esoteric thought. The works seem to exist outside of the often narrative space of film and video, instead becoming almost like moving, changing paintings or photographs.
