Photo: courtesy of the artist
Michel Boulanger grew up in a vast landscape shaped by fields and tall grasses. Fascinated by these vistas and what they contain — farms, animals, agricultural machinery, plants, and humans — he has made them the principal motifs in his art practice, allowing him to voice his concerns about forms of life and the machines that encompass and instrumentalize them. Drawing, a central medium in his work, extends into installations, digital images, and video animation. Through these disciplines, he highlights the increasingly rapid transformation of the rural environment in recent decades due to the extensive deployment of technologies in industrial agriculture. Dehumanized and anchored in productivism, and no longer seeming, as it were, connected with Earth’s living system, industrialized farming presents distinct political challenges.
