Virginie Lamarche calls her untitled photographs at Schneider “empty narratives”: though they hint at stories, the people in them aren’t really doing anything. One image shows about a dozen women in white tank tops, perhaps stretching or just sprawled on the floor, against a mirrored background that suggests a gym. Their reflections don’t match what they’re doing in front of the mirrors, though: she created the panoramic background here, and in two other pictures, by digitally pasting images together. She also used two women in different poses to create the group. For a picture of kids playing, she assembled the backdrop–an impossibly wide, seemingly endless two-story apartment house–from various shots of a single building in Carbondale and used two children for all the figures. She felt she didn’t need to manipulate the parking lot in another image (“the duplication was naturally there”), but its many figures in red jackets standing or lying on the asphalt are the same two women. This sort of work echoes Renaissance paintings showing multiple views of a narrative within the same piece–Hans Memling’s Scenes From the Passion of Christ depicts a dozen scenes related to the Crucifixion. But unlike these earlier images, Lamarche’s pieces have no narrative movement.
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Lamarche, who’s been reading existentialist philosophy since high school, sees her work as a mix of American and European traits. “The duplication I first saw in the U.S., but the idea of people seeming vacant, of an empty reality, is also a European one. There’s a French word, l’errance, which means ‘wandering aimlessly,’ but which you can interpret in a variety of ways–it can also be internal wandering, or the idea of taking a trip without knowing where you will go. For me, my work is an allegory for existence.”
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