Corinne Vionnet

BIOGRAPHY

Corinne Vionnet Biography

1969-

The Swiss French artist Corinne Vionnet is based in Vevey, Switzerland. Her work has been exhibited at Les Rencontres d'Arles; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; the FotoMuseum in Anvers; Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona; the Musée d'Art du Valais, Switzerland; the Musée Jenisch, Vevey, Switzerland; the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; the Chelsea Art Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Her work is presented at art fairs such as Paris Photo and Pulse Miami with Danziger Gallery and is included in the collections of SF Museum of Modern Art (USA), Musée d'Art du Valais (Switzerland), Musée français de la photographie (France) among others. It has also frequently appeared in the press including the Beaux-Arts Magazine, The Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, The British Journal of Photography, Les Lettres et Les Arts, Images Magazine, and Yvi. A monograph was released by Kehrer Verlag in 2011. Other publications include Photography Vol.4: The Contemporary Era 1981-2013, par Skira; Art and The Internet by Black Dog Publishing, MAO by Horizons Editions. Her series Photo Opportunities is featured in the documentary by Arte 'Collection PHOTO/Les Appropriationnistes', directed by Stan Neumann. In January 2013, she was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos and also to present her work at a conference called Seeing is Believing.

Vionnet addresses our relationship with time in her works, that of: recollection; individual or collective memory; the moment suspended in time; forgetfulness; traces; the end. Anything that includes a given time, often a moment in time that has passed, highlighted by her aesthetic choices flirting with banality and the commonplace but that, for those who wish to focus on it, slips effortlessly into the sublime. Her world is a no man's land, because it is specific to no one and inhabited by everyone. Her world is the one beyond the field of vision, a place of solitude or boredom, a place or moment that the majority traverse without really seeing. There is also something extra/ordinary about it, a place or moment that escapes any reference in its quest for strangeness and the grandiose. Her subject matter is found everywhere: from shooting to photographs she finds, to infinite and anonymous digital sources. Every image speaks to her and especially those that appear to have nothing to say or that are made banal as repeated by all and sundry.

Vionnet manages to express her opinions and emotions poetically as well as critically, leading us along challenging paths as they are lacking in any obvious appeal. And even the few portraits that punctuate her artwork do not escape it, stirred from their everyday existence to confront their unflickering solitude. To a certain extent, through her work she renews the challenging exercise of the Moebius strip by showing the ordinary and extraordinary appearance of things in a single image.  – from the artist’s website

About Photo Opportunities series from the artist:

We travel, we see a monument, we take a picture. Framing sites of mass tourism in our viewfinders, we create photographic souvenirs deed are integral to the touristic experience. Conducting keyword searches of famed monuments in photo sharing web sites, Swiss / French artist Corinne Vionnet culled Thousands of tourists' snapshots for her series Photo Opportunities. Weaving together Numerous photographic perspectives and experiences, the artist builds her own impressionistic interpretations - ethereal structures Which float gently in a dream-like haze of blue