RACHELLE BUSSIÈRES • And the sky will follow

OPENING: THURSDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2025 (6PM-9PM)
ARTIST TALK: SATURDAY 8 NOVEMBER (4PM)
EXHIBITION FROM 6 NOVEMBER TO 24 DECEMBER 2025

We are delighted to present Rachelle Bussières’s very first exhibition at the gallery. In And The Sky Will Follow, Rachelle Bussières invites us into a luminous horizon of time, light, and presence. Drawing inspiration from Etel Adnan’s poetic meditations on place, duration, and perception, Bussières weaves a language of subtle chromatic atmospheres.

“The sun shines through my windows with no difficulty as they are wide open. I try to touch the light but it disappears at that very moment; all I do is make shadows with my fingers… Then I think that the world is somewhere else …” (Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country)

Bussières’s practice is grounded in analog processes, executed in the darkroom, where time and light become her collaborators. Using silver gelatin paper, she exposes her substrate to controlled light sources (ambient, studio, filtered, direct) over durations, from seconds to hours to days, allowing the paper to gradually respond, transform, and record. Through techniques of dodging, masking, and carefully gestural shielding, she sculpts gradients and tones not through pigment but through the temporal interplay of exposure and shadow. Not developed the traditional way, the final colored motif which appears on her luminogram emerges on the black and white paper in the fixer bath, a moment of paradoxal revelation that crystallizes what was once invisible.

In Bussières’s words, time is not an abstraction—it is visible, embodied, indexed. Each print acts as a temporal trace: the particular color, hue, tone is a direct record of when, where, and how long the exposure occurred. The luminous blues, purples, pinks, warm beiges are not stylized effects but the residue of duration, light, and environmental conditions. In this sense, her works are never a static object but a palimpsest of light’s passage. The viewer becomes aware that the image is not simply seen—it has happened.

Bussières locates her approach between photography and sculpture, leaning on a lineage that includes photograms, early experimental photography, and the Light and Space movement. She also references Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, whose experiments with light, shadow, and materiality remain points of departure (and contest) in her work. Yet Bussières extends and transforms these genealogies: her practice is less concerned with technical mastery than with surrendering to the contingencies of light, environment, and chance. Rather than controlling every variable from a distance, she negotiates with light: she moves with her body, lets shadows intrude, masks areas, and sometimes lets chance intervene.

In parallels to Minimalism and Color Field painting, Bussières’s surfaces may appear at first to be fields of color—but they are never neutral. Her compositions occupy a liminal space: not quite landscape, not quite abstraction, not quite document, but a hybrid that points toward something beyond visual representation.

The poetic fragments by Etel Adnan echo throughout this work: “Every window thinks of itself as being an opening,” or “Time and fog escape our grasp.” These lines resonate with Bussières’s own interrogations: where is time? How does it leave a mark? In an era of ecological precarity, And The Sky Will Follow invites the viewer to a contemplative pause, to dwell, to slow, to sense. To look at Bussières’s work is to pause in front of a slow alchemy of light, to sense the vulnerability of perception and the ineluctable flow of time.

About the artist: Rachelle Bussières is a French-Canadian artist based in New York whose practice investigates perception, time, and the natural world. Bussières holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her work has been exhibited across North America and Europe, in countries including the United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Turkey. She has also participated in international residencies such as the Banff Centre, Penumbra Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Silver Art Projects. Her work is included in several public and private collections, among them the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Arter Contemporary Art Museum (Istanbul) and the SFMOMA Library. She received second place in the Snider Prize from the Museum of Contemporary Photography and was a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize. She has also received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work has been presented at major international art fairs, including Paris Photo, The Photography Show by AIPAD, Untitled Miami, Enter Art Fair, and Expo Chicago. In addition, she is the founder of LUMIERE NYC, a platform dedicated to experimental light-based photographic practices.