Gabrielle de Montmollin

Dreams, Delusions, and Other Traffic Circles

“Dreams, Delusions, and Other Traffic Circles” is a series of contemporary surrealist still lifes. Perhaps they are more surrealist than they are still lifes. The photographs in this series are narratives of objects in ambiguous relationships, weird juxtapositions and disconcerting non sequiturs.

The ‘wallpaper’ is the element that runs throughout. The wallpaper shows that everything happens on a set, it is theatre. The background is powerful, it distracts from the objects on the set, the ‘stars’ of the story. There is no obvious or hidden relationship between the players on the set and the wallpaper. Sometimes they go together but most of the time they clash, they have nothing in common, nothing to do with each other except that I have put them together. This is the tension and the drama.

Max Ernst defined the structure of the surrealist painting as "A linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them." I am not a painter but this is a good description of my photographs.

A selection from this series was exhibited as part of NOW HERE, an exhbition of 3 Welland artists, at AIH Studios in Welland, Ontario, from October 13 to 28, 2018