| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Jacques Rioux is a photographer who has been based in Calgary since completing a Diploma in Applied Photography at the CÉGEP du Vieux Montréal in 1979. In Calgary, he participated in various photography and multi-media workshops. He has practised technical, commercial and fine art photography throughout his career. He is perhaps best known for creating extensive photographic series, such as The Calgary Picture Project (late 1980s-1990s) and Western Badlands (1990s).
The Calgary series, in black and white, describes different aspects of the city – whether of urban scenes, or of green spaces – which are both documentary and subjective in approach. Rioux also makes his own presence subtly evident in shadows and shop windows, a self-conscious reference to the genre of portraiture and to the perspective of the photographer.
He has also made photographs that seek to reveal the mystical qualities of Alberta’s Badlands, and to share his own sense of discovery when he first saw this landscape. His black and white, high-contrast photos evoke the eerie qualities of the ancient geological formations, located “at the frontier of the real world,” in his words – spaces sacred to the Indigenous populations. Big skies with dramatic cloud formations and textures, and empty roads leading to vast horizons communicate Rioux’ sense of connection to the past. He has also photographed similar landscapes in the Southwestern United States.
Rioux’s work appears in permanent collections in Canada and Europe, including at Red Deer College, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum, Calgary; the National Gallery, and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; as well as in galleries in Luxembourg and Belgium.
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