Anne Ramsden

Begun in 2005, Anne Ramsden’s Musée du quotidien
/ Museum of the Everyday forms a fictional museum composed of an infinite variety of human actions and activities photographed in the most ordinary circum- stances. Its virtual images, taken mainly from the Internet, are incorporated into a vast collection that Ramsden uses to imitate the museological procedures of classifying and inventorying. Works by amateur photographers serve as the subjects of posters put up at random in urban space. By choosing ordinary images for her project, Ramsden calls the role of the museum into question.

The artist and Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal wish to thank Publicité Sauvage for their support of this project.

Anne Ramsden was born in 1952 in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She lives and works in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Using a wide variety of supports that include photography, installation, and drawing, Anne Ramsden collects and reconstructs the inno- cuous details of daily life. Espousing aesthetic means very similar to those of the amateur, she isolates ordinary objects and images from their original contexts and imbues them with new meaning. She appropriates the simplest artefacts produced by society to undercut the distinction between ordinary objects and cultural objects. Like the crockery in Anastylosis: Inventory (1999–2002), the photographs in Musée du quotidien / Museum of the Everyday (a project begun in 2005) do not lay claim to any aesthetic value yet abandon their original functions by being exhibited. Amateur photographs, kitchen utensils, and broken crockery are all part of a vast collection that Ramsden uses to mimic such museum procedures as classification, cataloguing, and display. By collecting and making meticulous inventories and methodically appropriating the most rudimentary elements, she generates a new experience from their appearance in museum or urban space. With Possession (1997) and Patina (1998), her posters assign a new space to consumer items and photographs taken from the Internet and apprehended in the immediacy of ephemeral public communication.

Anne Ramsden’s work has been featured in a variety of solo exhibitions, including La Collection et le Quotidien (Musée de Rimouski, 2007) and Telling Objects (Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum, Bergen, 2004). She has also taken part in group exhibitions such as Libre < échan- ge (Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal, 2007) and On Experiencing the City: Urban Interventions in Montréal (Optica, Montreal, 1997).