Claire Lesteven
Claire Lesteven is an Astérides Resident in 1993 and 1994. The archives of Triangle-Astérides do not allow for the determination of the exact dates or the duration of this residency in 1993 and 1994.
Claire Lesteven co-founded Triangle France in 1994, with Alun Williams.
Claire Lesteven was born in 1960, she lives and works between New York (US) and Peillac (FR)
In this era of image domination and the all-digital world, where nearly 95 million photos and videos are published every day on Instagram alone, Claire Lesteven offers an entirely different approach to photography and the image.
While her artistic practice was initially focused on drawing, her research gradually led her to use multi-pinhole camerae obscurae. More than a photographic medium in itself, these handmade cylindrical boxes, pierced at four equidistant points, are ultimately drawing tools more than photographic ones. These rudimentary circular boxes follow the model of the first photographic device in history and thus restore importance to the gesture and to photographic time. Claire Lesteven does not merely photograph the landscape in front of her, but also captures what is usually invisible to the photographer: what surrounds her or lies behind her, what is outside the frame.
By circumventing the classical approach to photographic gesture, she offers us a multiple and global vision that opens our eyes to the reverse side of the scene, where all gazes are equally important and no single point of view is privileged.
Claire Lesteven’s entire body of work rests on this shift in perspective. By playing with dimensions and perceptions, she disrupts our visual habits and changes the way we apprehend reality.
Text accompanying Claire Lesteven’s solo exhibition at the Abbaye Contemporary Art Space, Annecy-le-Vieux, 2020