Sami Blais
at Miguasha National Park (Nouvelle)
EXHIBITION
The Last Floor
Sami Blais, Québec City, Québec | samiblais.com
“The Last Floor is a project featuring Ulric and Ghitta Lejeune, a couple who left Europe after a bankruptcy to rebuild a life in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. When I met them, during the COVID-19 pandemic, they’d made their retirement dream come true: a 400-acre estate containing buildings constructed by hand with the help of volunteers, including myself, who’d come to find solitude and work in exchange for food and lodging. Quickly I directed a gaze loaded with my own stories at this spot that awoke something familiar in me.
“The project started and set the tempo for a dynamic that would be read by way of family arrangements. The family takes hold of a life, a dream, a buried generational silence. Birth and old age get mixed up and join together. The house as metaphor illustrates these loops of life, a cycle that echoes. It was through connection, help, collaboration and friendship that intimacy was unveiled. The silence of an inhabited house leaves traces, lets itself be borrowed by my eye and my history.
“Over time, a connection was made between us and that space. I made my way through that enigmatic mountain and that house in search of clues to decipher a place that seemed neglected. Ulric always wanted to close the loop, to re-create the exclusion of his childhood spent with his grandmother in Germany, hidden in a chateau during the Second World War, dreaming of freedom as much as anyone could. From the top of his chateau looking over the valley, I observe his body tired of being tired out. Between old age, denial and consumption, I perceive and document a solid, moving and complex couple.
“As a second step, I come back to think and to explore mourning and heritage. Everything forms and deforms, the cycle of life and the seasons takes on a meaning. In a winter’s closed session, I explore the state of places left without a master, I illustrate the absence, the silence and the traces of our visit.
“Build, admire, renovate, get old, die, bequeath: what remains of our dead? Telling a story until the end is an act of love.” – Sami Blais
EXHIBITION AT RENCONTRES
The Last Floor
Sami Blais is a photographer based between Québec City and Montreal. In 2022 he finished his photography studies at Cégep du Vieux Montréal, where he explored analog and the darkroom. It is the autobiographical quality of the medium that inspires, is the basis for and punctuates his work; photography as an immediate means of expression that binds the present and memory. His focus is on the symbolic language of the details of day-to-day life and on the poetic and narrative quality of light. He documents visible or invisible gestures to create a singular language that speaks to the common man or woman. In his spontaneity, what is involved is not the search to sublimate a desirable object, but rather to transform and process his photographic interests as a subject. Creating links, engaging in dialogue and collaborating are essential features that anchor and inspire his artistic practice.