NEW YORK, NY.- As the Olympics unfold in their various venues around Paris, Corinne Vionnet has just completed the latest series in her ongoing Photo Opportunities body of work focusing on re-imagined images of Paris.
Beginning in 2004 (before many other contemporary artists began layering j-pegs pulled from the internet) what both struck and interested Corinne Vionnet was that when tourists went to a popular travel destination they generally tried to take a picture of the picture they had already seen or that is in the collective imagination rather than seeing it freshly through their own eyes. It occurred to Vionnet that if she searched various online tourist travel sites she could find multiple variations of the same iconic views and if she collected and layered approximately 100 of these images on top of each other she would arrive at a new conglomerate image that had a photographic basis, a painterly aspect, and a conceptual underpinning.
With the necessary skill to adjust the layers, Vionnet produced works that both time travel and crowd source. In her earlier picture of the Taj Mahal, for example, some of the layers date back to photographs taken over a hundred years ago.
Now adding to her photographic atlas, Vionnet has re-created images of Pariss celebrated views the Eiffel Tower, The Seine, The Arc de Triomphe, The Louvre, Notre Dame, The Centre Pompidou, and others. For photography connoisseurs there is even The Grand Palais.
Corinne Vionnet is a Franco-Swiss visual artist based in Switzerland.
She is a pioneer in the exploration and re-purposing of web-based imagery. Her work includes extensive archival research, photographic image making, the appropriation of crowd-sourced material, and collage.
She is part of these first artists to have had interest in exploring and re-purposing the Web-based imagery. Her artistic process includes extensive archival research, photographic image making, the appropriation of crowd-sourced material, and collage.
Her works led her to analyze the construction and maintenance of the social imagination and collective identity, as well as our behavior with images, with the act of taking of pictures as well as the content of these overflow of pictures.
Her works conveys the ambiguous lure of the Internet, which seemingly promises freedom and the discovery of new worlds, yet, in reality, imprisons us all you in a algorithm space, and make us believe that we are unique.
Today, she is heading towards investigations of our perceptions of reality, as well as the strength of the images, their power of persuasion, and the transformation and building of emblematic figures.
Corinne Vionnets work is included in the collections of SF MOMA, San Francisco; Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne; Musée Carnavalet, Paris; Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao; Musée d'Art du Valais, Sion; Musée d'Art, Pully; Musée français de la photographie, among others. Her artist books are part of collection of the Fotomuseum in Winterthur, the MOMA of New York, Whitney Museum in New York, NYPL in New York, MACBA in Barcelona, Reina Sofia in Madrid, Bibliothèque d'art et d'archéologie in Geneva, to name a few.
She had solo shows including the Swiss Camera Museum (2018); Danziger Gallery, New York (2015); Oslo 8, Basel (2012); and East Wing, Doha (exhibition in Dubai, 2009).
She also has participated in numerous group exhibitions such as V&A, Dundee (2024); Musée Carnavalet, Paris (2024-25); Elektron, Esch-sur-Alzette (2024); Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao (2023); Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum (2021-22), C|O Berlin (2021), SFMOMA, San Francisco (2019); Centrale for Contemporary Art, Brussel (2018); Musée des Beaux-Arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds (2017); Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne (2017); Musées d'art et d'histoire, Geneva (2015-16); Musée d'Art du Valais, Sion, Switzerland (2021-22; 2020; 2015-16; 2012); Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2015); FotoMuseum, Antwerp (2015 and 2012); Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2013); Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona (2013); Musée Jenisch, Vevey, Switzerland (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2011).
Her work has been included in photography festivals and art biennials such as Visiona, Spain; Jeju Art Biennial, Korea; Images, Switzerland; Fotofestiwal, Poland; Photo Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Fotográfica Bogotá, Colombia; and Les Rencontres d'Arles, France; as well as at art fairs including Photo London, Pulse Miami, and Paris Photo.
Her first monograph, Photo Opportunities, is published in 2011 (Kehrer Verlag, Germany). ME. Here Now, her second book, is published in 2017 (Fall Line Press, USA). In 2018, she self-published Total Flag which all had great press coverage, Automated_Matterhorn in 2019, CIELS in 2020 and Total Palm Tree in 2021. Also in 2019, she was approached by RRose Editions and published Souvenirs d'un glacier, which is very successful, then worked again together in 2023 to publish the artist book Almost There.