Paul-Emile Rioux has been working with digital media for the last fifteen years.
He began working as a product photographer and his work has also long been concerned with the urban environment.
This new series: LANDCUTS: Meanings of edited geographies, confronts the city as a set of abstract concepts, perceptions, expectations and power conflicts which are first transformed into and then confined by the physical structure that grows from them.
The series attempts to use devices from both cinema and landscape photography, then reinterpreted through digital media to comment on our shifting relationship to space and place, to how we think about environment and nature and the kinds of ends and uses we are striving for.
For this series Rioux has found 3D models of topography on the internet over which he has superimposed his own imaginary surfaces. The works seem at once like geological models, film-stills or sculptural maquettes. The new application of these images makes them more cryptic and silent. In this series Rioux carries on with his exploration-invention of synthetic landscapes where he takes the viewer to places that speak less directly to him or her in a recognizable language - both more inward and alien, that do not instruct so much as leave one with an unarticulated sense of inbalance.
