White Desert White Desert consists of three components; a large digital print (White Desert), a small installation work, Maquette for a Filmic Moment, and the large installation Triumph: Reversing Forward.

White Desert – large digital inkjet print

The impetus for White Desert began in the titular region of the Western Sahara. While there, I felt as if I had stepped into the set of an epic film — a feeling that is always with me when I am in foreign environments. Equally, however, when in unfamiliar environments, my thoughts tend to wander back to familiar things, to commonalities — perhaps seeking some semblance of normalcy amid the chaos of the new and unfamiliar.

The White Desert collage is a delirium of moments caught and reassembled into a large panoramic photo-collage that reads like a film strip. Reading left to right, the work begins in Cairo and weaves itself through the White Desert in Egypt, crosses the Sahara Desert and arrives in downtown Montreal. In one segment a lamp post outside my house (in Canada) becomes the light that hovers like an alien spaceship while the white jeep symbolizes the “safe house for travel and tourism, and perhaps even “home” (a word, for me, that carries more unbearable weight and lightness than I care to admit). This collage enabled me to create new a geographical location, rooted in ‘real’ experience but remembered as a single imagined moment.

Maquette for a Filmic Moment replicates a scene from the large White Desert collage into a small installation piece, providing a more ‘intimate epic.’ Ingredients: sand, miniature jeep, lampposts, outdoor movie projection screen, and video projector. 

Triumph: Reversing Forward uses the wooden dashboard of the Triumph TR6 (sports car), as an automated flaneur. A video projection of roads moving forward through my eyes, is from a rearview mirror–hanging above the dashboard.  Ingredients: Triumph TR6 dashboard, rearview mirror, wires and video projector.

Exhibitions
White Desert in its entirety was shown in a solo context at Gallery Optica, Montreal, QC., in conjunction with Mois de la Photo Montreal, QC 2005
White Desertand a reinterpretation of Triumph: Reversing Forward, was exhibited at the XIV Encuentros Abiertos, Festival de la Luz, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2006.
Triumph: Reversing Forward was part of the Culture Crash exhibition at SAW Gallery, Ottawa. ON., in conjunction with the Ottawa International Auto show, 2007.

Reviews
De Julio-Paquin, Jean, “Le spectateur et l’oeuvre photographique,” Vie des arts, #201, Winter 2006
Arden, Paul, “Ramlochand: White Desert”, Artpress #319, January 2005
Crevier, Lyne “Ramona Ramlochand”, Ici, September 2005