Suzan Vachon’s artistic research, infused with an intensely poetic dimension, questions the relative relationships between the visual and the verbal, between imagery and literature, without forgetting the silence of the perception of the sensorial and of the meditative gaze.  

The blending or metonymic meeting of images and verbalized text creates a fragmented understanding, segmented in a space outside of all expected perspectives.

Yvan  Moreau,  http://id.erudit.org/culture/etc1073425/etc1118705/35653ac

About the artist
Suzan Vachon is an artist with interdisciplinary training. She taught Activités vidéographiques and Recherches vidéographiques at the Université de Montréal’s  Pavillon Mont-Royal for 12 years. She has taught at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques at UQAM since 1992.   

Vachon is interested in the metamorphosis of form and meaning through compositional work with still and moving images. Her research deals with the haptic dimension of image, sound and text and is part of a continuum of work centred around the archive, literature, cinema and the imaginaire of languages.

She was selected for Public Domain, a project commissioned by Saw Video in collaboration with Library and Archives Canada and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which toured North America and Europe in 2011-2012. In 2013, she was selected by the Conseil québécois des arts médiatiques (CQAM) to join the Quebec delegation at 50 ans d’art vidéo, which took place at Festival Les Instants Vidéo, Marseille. During a residency at Centre Sagamie, she researched printed images from the film archives of the Red Cross and the British Pathé News. Her work has been selected for 13 public art commissions including a light and video installation on permanent display at the Théâtre Prospero in Montréal.  

Vachon has been awarded the research grant Perfectionnement longue durée 2017-2018 from UQAM. In 2019-20, she will carry out an transdisciplinary curatorial residency at Vidéographe.

Her videographic and interdisciplinary works have been shown in Canada, the United States, South America, Palestine and several European countries.