French artist Marion Tampon-Lajarriette (b.1982) explores how the image haunts memory and perception - in reality as much as in art. With the help of contemporary digital technology, Tampon-Lajarriette explores various iconic activities or scenes of action in order to create the impression of dramaturgically reproducing or creating memories. The effect for the viewer is that of exploring the general consciousness of the audience. Her work heavily draws on the repertoire of cinema: whether it is the arresting picture of characters falling into the vertiginous image perspective, or an inherent sense of displacement created by staring over the moving surface of the ocean: Tampon-Lajarriette highlights how images penetrate the mind and are recreated through transformative and selective processes of memory. Sometimes the cinematic influence is not immediately recognisable; however, only because the artist uses films as a visual reference in order to explore something else. Tampon-Lajarriette: “I use cinema to challenge our imagination.”

In the words of Elie During (2012): “You have to picture the artist as an ant finding the grainy surface of the images directly under its feet, or as a mole exploring galleries in all their virtual depth. In this case, “virtual” doesn’t imply reality reduced to its sign but the resources found at the margins of or beneath the image, which are also memory’s secret areas of communication. You can fall into an image, wander around in it, explore its surface in an endless tracking shot which becomes indistinguishable from a long static movement, from a kind of crawling of the image itself. In these different forms of motion there’s something both strange and obvious.”

Tampon-Lajarriette has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at Galerie Skopia, Geneva, 2012, 2009, 2007 and Galerie Dix9, Paris, 2012, 2010. Her work has also been shown at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Mamco, Geneva; Garage CCC, Moscow; Cinémathèque Française, Paris; Festival Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse; and is part of the permanent collection at Mamco, Geneva; Maison Européenne de La Photographie, Paris; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; and the Francois Pinault Foundation. Galerie Skopia showed her work at Art Basel 43 in 2012.