Ice Follies 2025
February 7th - 21st, 2025THEME: OZHAASHIKWAA (THE ICE IS SLIPPERY)
There is slippery ice; extra care and consideration is needed. Travelling and moving forward is difficult; the conditions are unsteady. The terrain ahead demands resilience and adaptability as the path forward remains uncertain.
Anyse Ducharme, The Water Was a Sheet of Glass, 2025
PRESENTED BY NEAR NORTH MOBILE MEDIA LAB
Anyse Ducharme’s the water was a sheet of glass is a site-specific installation for Ice Follies 2025 that delves into the complex interplay between virtual and tangible social contexts. The work invites viewers to sit on a bench overlooking the vast, frozen expanse of Lake Nipissing while listening to AI-generated voices recite hashtags collected from Instagram posts about the lake.
Hashtags, often seen as tools for organizing and sharing content, serve a deeper function: they represent a collective longing for connection, belonging, and visibility in an increasingly digital world. However, when voiced by an AI, these human expressions are transformed into unsettling abstractions—snippets of human experience reduced to algorithmic keywords.
Through this juxtaposition, Ducharme highlights the tension between lived experience and the flattening effect of digital communication. Hashtags, in their brevity, aim to capture moments of connection, yet they risk stripping away nuance and depth. When sorted and amplified by algorithms, these fragments can narrow perspectives and deepen feelings of isolation, even as they strive to foster intimacy.
Against the boundless backdrop of the lake, the AI’s mechanical voice becomes a paradoxical reminder of this tension: a longing for closeness that, in its pursuit, may inadvertently simplify and distance us from the intricate, interwoven relationships that make us human. By combining the meditative act of gazing across the lake with the dissonance of AI-spoken hashtags, the water was a sheet of glass invites audiences to reflect on how digital life shapes—and perhaps distorts—our attempts to connect.
Artist Bio:
Anyse Ducharme (elle | she | her) is a franco-ontarian (fr | en) media artist, curator + teacher from northeastern Ontario, Robinson-Huron Treaty Territory. Her artistic production locates itself in an opposition (from within) to digital colonialism through small, sometimes subversive acts: glitching images with internet comments; dismantling assumptions of transparency that are both promoted and compromised by the ways in which knowledge is increasingly organized in the era of the computer; and by exploring the malleability of data through the transformation of information into various representational states.
Her work has been exhibited with Format C (Zagreb), School of Machines (Berlin), L.O.M.A. (London, On), Flux Gallery – AceArt Inc (Winnipeg), Gallery 44 (Toronto), la Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario (Sudbury), InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre (Toronto) and as part of the Flash Forward festival for emergent photography (Boston, Portland, Toronto). Recent work “I’ve swear ive followed the instruction but my heart can’t close” is for sale with Printed Matter, Inc. (New York)
Ducharme has a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, un Baccalauréat en Arts Visuels from the University of Ottawa and a college diploma in 3D Animation from La Cité collégiale.
Social Links:
Website: http://www.anyseducharme.com/