“I tell stories from my personal domain that are specific, yet universal. Returning to similar subjects, narrating them in different ways — I try to peel of layers, touching upon visceral aspects of life — whether it is in a film, a photograph, a performance or an installation. I am interested in exploring a world that resides between dream and a wakeful state. A realm of images, sounds and fragmented tales without the necessity of an obvious narrative. I hope they will function as a catalyst for the viewer’s personal fantasies and be a door into self discovery.”

— Florence Montmare

Exhibition

Scenes from an island

Bergmancenter Fårö June 24 - September 30

“I sought myself and found the Island. The Island forces you to revisit memories, dreams, fears, shortcomings. In the silence time expands and I hear my heartbeat. There is a slight chill in the air and the ocean is waiting like a mirror.”

Midway in life, I found myself standing on the barren shores, a wild and rocky pile of land facing the Baltic sea. It was a strange uncompromising attraction. I saw my mother’s Swedish origin a stone’s throw away and father’s Cretan heritage merge into this one landscape.

I returned over and over again. At first it was only the landscape that I photographed. With time I populated the images, staging scenarios in various locations.

There are interiors and exteriors; landscape sans figures and landscape with figures transitioning through it. Bodies in motion contrasted to the desolate topography and its dramaturgy

— mountains that have corrupted, the earth, the water and the air. A contemplation on evanescence and transience; body, movement and the surrounding elements.

Illuminations

Reciprocity Failure
E=Itp

In 2002 my relationship was slowly falling apart. While trying to save our relationship it became obvious the break had become inevitable. As a way of documenting our last days together, I started making one photograph every night. The camera shutter was left opened for 3 to 8 hours every night in front of our bed in a darkened bedroom, and as the beginning morning light arrived the exposure was interrupted. It is a private journal, documenting time and memory, where present meets past.

PRESS RELEASE

“...when love and companionship encounters longing and disconnection”

— Florence Montmare

“An enlightening exhibition about love and loss... inspired by impending heart break... anyone who has experienced it just want to move on, but you were documenting it!”

— Contessa Brewer, NBC

“Florence Montmare took that experience and turned it on its head ... incredibly beautiful and, dare we say it, quite poignant.”

— TimeOut New York

“A multi-sensory experience of the relationship and its demise”

— New York Post

“A view from the foot of her bed, the most intimate of place you can find suddenly becomes universal”

— Posture Magazine

TimeOut New York | Posture Magazine | Tidningen Kulturen

Grove

“Before my father passed away he said: ‘One day you will realize where you belong, and you will go home.’ This is about that journey.”

— Florence Montmare

Growing up in Sweden, I often felt torn between cultures: Sweden, Greece and Austria (where I was born). My father left early to start a new life in his native Greece. In 2007 he passed away in cancer, leaving behind property on the island of Crete. Being a woman, I was given the property with the least value — half of an olive grove up in the hills. Could I live in what had been given to me, in what had come to symbolize my roots and origin?

As an experiment I traveled to Crete to spend time in the grove and to explore my personal history. Essentially a diary — Grove is an investigation of time, and deals with the physicality, surface and ambiguities of the imaginary and material world. A metaphor for impermanence; my body asleep in the hammock, dissolves and re-materializes through night-long exposures.

Exhibition

Scenes from an island

Bergmancenter Fårö June 24 - September 30

Illuminations

Reciprocity FailureE=Itp

Grove

Space Untitled

Reciprocity Failure
E=Itp