Sabrina Ratté

Sabrina Ratté is a Canadian artist based in Montreal. Using an array of technical tools, such as 3D scans, analog video synthesizers, and 3D animation, her formal approach serves as the foundation for the creation of intricate ecosystems that manifest across various platforms, from interactive installations to series of videos, digital prints, sculptures, or virtual Reality. Exploring the convergence of technology and biology, the interplay between materiality and virtuality, and the speculative evolution of our environment, her work is influenced by the realms of science fiction, philosophy, and theoretical writings. Ratté portrays worlds devoid of humans, where forgotten remnants continue to evolve and forge new relationships with the ecosystem.

Her work has been exhibited in institutions such as the Laforet Museum in Tokyo, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the PHI Center in Montreal, the Chronus Art Center in Shanghai, the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl, and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. She has presented solo exhibitions at Gaîté Lyrique in Paris and Arsenal Contemporary Art in Montreal and New York. Notably, her work is part of the collection at the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum. Ratté was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in Canada in 2019 and went on to receive the award in 2020.

While confined to her home in Montreal during the Covid 19 crisis, Sabrina Ratté conceived of her Monades series. She had never used the human body as her subject before, but she decided to make do with the resources available to her. Inspired by the philosophical concept of the monad, which she interprets as an entity perceiving reality from its own point of view, a "bubble of subjectivity", the artist scans her body and has it personify multiple, unique perspectives on the world. Starting with an imperfect photogrammetry, she deconstructs her body using 3D softwares, "disarticulating" and "recomposing" it, to use the words of the Franco-German painter, photographer and sculptor Hans Bellmer who inspired this stage of the work. The result is four, 3D porcelain-like creatures, posing in four different universes and each reflecting a particular vision of the world.

Monade II is set in a kind of architectured void, a dehumanized virtual universe that echoes the all-out digitization of our society. Vegetation motifs are stuck to her surface.

The sculptural nature of the body, the technical mastery, the aestheticism and the very term "monad" are reminiscent of ancient Greece, an eternal source of inspiration for artists. But here, the hero is a heroine.