Isabelle Hayeur is an image-based artist, born in Montreal in 1969. She holds a Bachelor’s (1997) and a Master’s (2002) degrees in Fine Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal. She is mostly known for her large-size photomontages, her videos, and her site-specific installations.

Her artistic practice was initially centered on video. From 1997 to 2001, she belonged to Perte de signal, a collective dedicated to emerging work in media arts, being one of the founding members. The group soon had its work shown in most international festivals and was organizing a number of events and exhibitions of its own.

Around the same period, her practice in photography was gaining in importance and she began to show her work regularly. She became known on the Montreal scene in 2001 with her solo show Chantiers at Centre des arts actuels Skol, for which she received the Mois de la photo’s prize for emerging artists. That same year, she also created Station, her first site-specific installation.

“I have always been concerned by the transformations landscapes undergo,” explains Isabelle Hayeur. “Growing up in a suburb, I was faced with the spectacle of urban sprawl and the disappearance of so many things in its path. My approach is tied to this experience and draws from discourses surrounding environmental issues such as land use planning. I am particularly interested in feelings of alienation, uprootedness, and dislocation.”

The artist’s works offer a critique of recent urban and environmental upheavals, by showing territories that appear “natural”, though they have been created artificially. Her art proves to be both political and poetic, constantly striving to defy simplistic interpretations so as to highlight the ambivalence of our relation to the world.

The series Uncertain Landscapes (1998-2002), Destinations (2003-2004), Model Homes (2004-2007), Excavations (2005-2008) and Underworlds (2008 - ) are among her most significant photographic works. In Destinations, Hayeur doctors photorealism, frustrating our expectations about landscapes. The series Excavations emphasizes the invisible and combines landscapes that should exclude each other. Playing on scales, the artist also strives to make look vulnerable certain features of the landscape that are normally experienced as immutable. In this way, she shows how malleable our world is, and how easy it is for us nowadays to tamper with the scheme of things.

Among her videos, Si jamais la mer (1998), Vertige (2000), Losing Ground (2009) et Uprooted (2012) deserve mention. In Vertige, the artist underlines the ambiguous character of a former asbestos mine turned tourist spot. Losing Ground shows ostentatious neighbourhoods as evidence of a standardized landscape. Uprooted explores the peripheries of some North American cities, strangely alike from one to the next, in that none of them feels like somewhere.

Among her site-specific installations, Issue (2004), Tunnel Vision (2007) Fire with Fire (2010) and Ascension (2011) stand out in an art form that is particularly close to her heart. Presented at Montreal’s Incinérateur des Carrières, Issue suggests a parallel between the vastness of this space dedicated to refuse and our society’s phenomenal output in garbage. Fire with Fire, created for the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, simulates a fire in a building of a notorious red-light district. This work thus thumbs its nose at the Olympic Games and at the organizers’ professed intention to magnify the city, regardless of the existing poverty and helplessness.

Isabelle Hayeur’s works have been widely shown throughout Canada, in Europe, and in the United States. Some have also been exhibited in Mexico, in Argentina, in Turkey, and in Japan. She has taken part in several important exhibitions, among others at the National Gallery of Canada, at the Musée d’art contemporain of Montreal, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts (MassMoca), at the Casino Luxembourg — Forum d'art contemporain, at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and at the Tampa Museum of Art. She has also done a number of artist residencies.

In 2006, she had her first retrospective exhibition, organized by the Musée national des Beaux-Arts du Québec and Oakville Galleries. Accompanied by a monograph, this exhibition has been shown in Ontario, in Nova Scotia, in Quebec, and in Alberta. That same year, she took part in the 37es Rencontres internationales de la photographie in Arles in connection with the "Découverte" prize.

Her works are found in some twenty collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada, of the Fonds national d’art contemporain (FNAC, Paris), of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, of the Vancouver Art Gallery, of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM), of the Musée national des Beaux-arts du Québec, of Oakville Galleries and of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago (MoCP).