Sylvie Bélanger: Le regard du silence 

In 1997-98, Sylvie Bélanger, an artist then living in Windsor, had a solo art show at Art Windsor-Essex titled De la séduction à la résistance. Her work, Le regard du silence (1997), was featured in the show, and later purchased by AWE. This “video sculpture” hasn’t been shown publicly since it was acquired in 1999. 

Le regard du silence shows Bélanger’s interest in technology and the human body. THe work depicts a woman’s face fading in and out of focus as oversized book pages turn. Bélanger, like many artists in the 1980s and 1990s, used ephemeral materials to create time-based art. Bélanger aimed to illustrate how technology struggles to capture human experiences, against the growing influence of emerging technologies like the Internet. The artwork’s theme contrasts the allure of the woman’s face with the fear of her disappearance. This reflects our concerns about merging our real and virtual selves in today’s complex world.  

Art Windsor-Essex is currently digitizing its collection of new media artworks to preserve them for future generations. We have started with Le regard du silence, which was originally on a looping VHS tape. The digital transfer shows the wear from being displayed at multiple galleries over the years. Our role is now to determine how much of this visual “noise” is original to the work and reflects the intentions of the artist, and what can be restored to ensure that our experience of the work is true to its first presentation in the late 1990s.