Julie C. Fortier was born in Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada in 1973. She now lives in Rennes (France) as of 2001. She holds a MFA from the Visual and Media Arts School of the University of Québec in Montréal.
While her first videos explored the ephemeral nature of performance, Fortier’s work has moved away from the figurative. Her goals are now to produce substitutive forms of emptiness, void and absence. The subjects of her video work are linked to her homeland and her memory. She finds her subjects mainly while she is in a state of dislocation by car, train or simply walking. They are often objects seen from the road. Non-narrative and from one fixed shot, her video work explores stillness and the possibility of suspending time. Searching for strange details in familiar landscapes, she makes illusions appear in the documentation of the real, without the use of special effects or other enhancements. This suspended character of her subjects, their immobility punctuated with thin events, exploits both waiting and desire only to return once again to a melancholic absence.

Solo exhibitions of her work have taken place at La Criée, Art Centre of Rennes, VF Gallery (Marseille), Clark Centre (Montréal), Art et Essai Gallery (Rennes), La Box Gallery (Bourges). Since 1999 her work has been featured in several festivals, events and group exhibitions including Interfaces at Le Quartier (Quimper), Experimenta Playground at the Arts Centre of Melbourne, Le Livre et l’Art et Le Lieu Unique (Nantes), Face LIFT at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, MAK Nite at Museum of Contemporary and Applied Art (Vienna), Future_Feed_Forward at Forest City Gallery (London), Single Channel at Blaffer Gallery (Houston) and Trames horizontales / défilement vertical at Museum of Québec. She also teaches Visual Art in the Art School of Angers since 2007.

Artist Code: 431