{"id":476,"date":"2026-06-04T13:24:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T17:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/?page_id=476"},"modified":"2026-06-04T13:24:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T17:24:17","slug":"normand-rajotte-like-a-whisper-the-continuation","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/normand-rajotte-like-a-whisper-the-continuation\/","title":{"rendered":"Normand Rajotte, Like a Whisper (The continuation)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wpb-content-wrapper\"><div id=\"tdi_1\" class=\"tdc-row\"><div class=\"vc_row tdi_2  wpb_row td-pb-row\" >\n<style scoped>\n\/* custom css - generated by TagDiv Composer *\/\n\n\/* custom css - generated by TagDiv Composer *\/\n.tdi_2,\r\n                .tdi_2 .tdc-columns{\r\n                    min-height: 0;\r\n                }.tdi_2,\r\n\t\t\t\t.tdi_2 .tdc-columns{\r\n\t\t\t\t    display: block;\r\n\t\t\t\t}.tdi_2 .tdc-columns{\r\n\t\t\t\t    width: 100%;\r\n\t\t\t\t}.tdi_2:before,\r\n\t\t\t\t.tdi_2:after{\r\n\t\t\t\t    display: table;\r\n\t\t\t\t}\n<\/style><div class=\"vc_column tdi_4  wpb_column vc_column_container tdc-column td-pb-span12\">\n<style scoped>\n\/* custom css - generated by TagDiv Composer *\/\n\n\/* custom css - generated by TagDiv Composer *\/\n.tdi_4{\r\n                    vertical-align: baseline;\r\n                }.tdi_4 > .wpb_wrapper,\r\n\t\t\t\t.tdi_4 > .wpb_wrapper > .tdc-elements{\r\n\t\t\t\t    display: block;\r\n\t\t\t\t}.tdi_4 > .wpb_wrapper > .tdc-elements{\r\n\t\t\t\t    width: 100%;\r\n\t\t\t\t}.tdi_4 > .wpb_wrapper > .vc_row_inner{\r\n\t\t\t\t    width: auto;\r\n\t\t\t\t}.tdi_4 > .wpb_wrapper{\r\n\t\t\t\t    width: auto;\r\n\t\t\t\t    height: auto;\r\n\t\t\t\t}\n<\/style><div class=\"wpb_wrapper\" >[vc_column_text]\r\n<h3>Normand Rajotte, Like a Whisper (The continuation)<\/h3>\r\nIsa Tousignant\r\nGalerie Pang\u00e9e, Montr\u00e9al \u2013 \u2028September 14 to November 9, 2011\r\n\r\nEvery summer until we were teenagers, my sister and I spent three entire months running like wild things through the dense forest of the Laurentians. With our two neighbour friends and a borrowed husky dog, we explored every nook, cranny, brook, and blueberry bush of a stretch of about two kilometres around our cottage all day, every day. They were some of my favourite times, times of excitement, serenity, and free-spiritedness that I\u2019ve attempted to re-create since \u2013 with only a modicum of success. So, when photographer Normand Rajotte told me of his return to the land and his purchase, with his brothers, of a little bit of wilderness at the foot of Mont-M\u00e9gantic, in the Eastern Townships, I viscerally understood the yearning that he had satisfied. \u201cThe forest was always important in my childhood,\u201d he told me as we walked through his recent exhibition at Galerie Pang\u00e9e, \u201cLike a Whisper (The Continuation),\u201d which featured thirteen small- and medium-sized colour landscape prints. \u201cIt was marvellous to me, by which I mean I marvelled at it. It was a place of fantasy tinged with surrealism \u2013 I\u2019d see things that weren\u2019t there, perceive things that were just outside the periphery of vision.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe body of work at Galerie Pang\u00e9e was the second chapter of the \u201cLike a Whisper\u201d show curated by Anne-Marie Ninacs as part of Le Mois de la Photo de Montr\u00e9al 2011 and concurrently exhibited at L\u2019Arsenal, in Griffintown. Whereas for the works in that space Rajotte\u2019s lens was focused very tightly on nature\u2019s turf \u2013 most of them literally displayed a square metre or so of earth, soil, grass, or mud and the animal traces that they encase, which, for the artist, act as a reference to the photographic imprint \u2013 the photographs at Galerie Pang\u00e9e took a greater distance from their subject. This show featured more traditional perspectives on landscape, shot with a tripod from a standpoint that allows the viewer to see ground, horizon, and sky, as well as the forest in all its thick intensity and evocative chaos. In a way, this was a departure for Rajotte; his previous two series have been much more tightly cropped and focused on abstract textures, natural formations, and markings on the ground. It was nice to see him look up. W. J. T. Mitchell is an avid examiner of landscape in art, and in his book Landscape and Power, he complexifies the notion into a more sophisticated, three-pronged idea that involves a mix of place, space, and landscape.1 Though they are three facets of a single relationship with land, these terms can be distinguished: place is the physical location; space is what that place becomes once it is put into play by human use, once it has been ascribed a purpose or significance; and landscape is what it becomes once it is encountered as an image, or a representation. Where Rajotte breaks from the Romantic tradition of landscape that champions pristine, untouched wilderness is in his acknowledgment of Mitchell\u2019s idea of space \u2013 that activation of a place by human presence and conception. Recurrently in his oeuvre, but also in two notable works in \u201cLike a Whisper (The Continuation)\u201d \u2013 one in which you see the artist\u2019s hand in a pool of water, playing with minnows, the other in which you see his footsteps in the mud, overlaid with a heron\u2019s \u2013 Rajotte consciously includes humanity in his homage to nature. His conception is not of the wild as an unspoiled ideal or a rapidly declining natural resource; rather, it is simply the framework for our existence, a holistic component of who we are. \u201cWhen I\u2019m in nature I feel like I\u2019m part of the ambient air,\u201d he says. Man and Mother Nature are simply indivisible.\r\n\r\nSince buying that land in 1997 and regaining access to a type of nature with which he hadn\u2019t lived since childhood, Rajotte has built \u2013 with his own two hands \u2013 a small cottage and set about exploring its surroundings, camera in tow. For about a decade, he did so methodically: he would pore over the map in the evening and chart out his next day\u2019s explorations, which could take him anywhere within a twenty-kilometre radius of the house. But as the years passed, having familiarized himself with his environs, Rajotte reduced his circle of exploration and began returning to certain spots within a couple of kilometres from his cottage over and over, year after year, month after month. \u201cI became attuned to the transformations \u2013 because nature moves, you know, with the seasons, with light conditions, depending on the time of day,\u201d he says. Rajotte may walk for two hours but travel only a short distance. If he feels inclined to go left, he goes left; then he may turn right, and then choose to retrace his steps. \u201cI follow the forest\u2019s own movements,\u201d he says. It is as if, over the years, Rajotte has undergone a reverse walkabout.\r\n\r\nWithin Australian Aborigine cultures, the walkabout was a common rite of passage for young boys as they transitioned into manhood that involved their meandering over large and unknown territories. The idea was to walk aimlessly, often for months, guided not by logic or the conscious mind but by the pull of ancestry and spiritual guidance. I see in Rajotte\u2019s method a parallel learning experience, in which he has sought to shed the rigours of controlled, rational behaviour \u2013 a very adult and urban method \u2013 to instead adopt an instinctive attitude to his environment. My personal hunch is that he is trying to regain a wisdom that he had unthinkingly mastered as a ten-year-old.\r\nEither way, Mitchell was on to something when he wrote, \u201cThe indeterminacy of affect seems, in fact, to be a crucial feature\u2028of whatever force landscape can have.\u201d2\r\n\r\n1\u2002 W. J. T. Mitchell, \u201cPreface: Space, Place, and Landscape,\u201d in Landscape and Power (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), pp. vii\u2013xii.\r\n\r\n2\u2002Ibid, p. vii.\r\n\r\nIsa Tousignant is a contributing editor for Canadian Art magazine and a blogger on the Montreal arts scene for akimbo.ca, as well as a freelance writer on culture, lifestyle, design and travel. After working as a newspaper and magazine editor for over a decade, she recently left the land of cubicles to write her first book, about animals in contemporary art.[\/vc_column_text]<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[vc_column_text] Normand Rajotte, Like a Whisper (The continuation) Isa Tousignant Galerie Pang\u00e9e, Montr\u00e9al \u2013 \u2028September 14 to November 9, 2011 Every summer until we were teenagers, my sister and I spent three entire months running like wild things through the dense forest of the Laurentians. With our two neighbour friends and a borrowed husky dog, [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-476","page","type-page","status-publish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":477,"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/476\/revisions\/477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.normandrajotte.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}