My practice uses digital photography to question our recent yet exponential relationship to our phones as photographic devices. I am currently working on a corpus of photographic self-portraits that through a female gaze reveals my inner dialogue about what it means to identify as a woman in the digital era. It asks: What internalized bullshit do we still carry? Is there anything good we can keep? Can irony help us better understand complicated issues? Harsh neon colours, kitsch aesthetics, and humorous social media-worthy titles interact together to create space for exploring identity in a time where selfies can both be a tool of empowerment and oppression for people identifying as women. It puts these questions in perspective with the close relationship I  hold with my iPhone: the omnipotence of this luminous prosthesis, always at the tip of my fingers, allowing me to share my work as an artist, but also allowing me to produce my work  technically – I use it as a prop, a monitor, and a remote for the camera. My selfies are looking at themselves, through themselves. Can I reflect on/with them?

Morgane Clément-Gagnon is a visual artist from Montréal, Canada. Inspired by her academic past in philosophy, she uses digital photography as a self-representation tool to create visual essays that question her identity as a millenial woman. Her work is a synthesis of references to canonic paintings and photographs, Western philosophy, and devices from the digital era, opening a dialogue onto how we come to think about the Self with the omnipresence of screens, social media, cellphones, and their impact on representation and privilege. 

Since 2017, she has been taking part in artist residencies locally (Résidence Nomade, Sagamie) and internationally (SIM Residency in Iceland, Praksis in Norway). Her work has been exhibited in various galleries in Montreal, New York, and throughout Scandinavia. She is currently working on her MFA under the supervision of Manon De Pauw. Her thesis explores the narrative power of the gaze in a series of collaborative self-portraits.