AMEL CHAMANDYMultidisciplinary Artist

When working with her camera, she is inspired by the ordinary. She shoots scenes of everyday life – on the street and elsewhere – then deconstructs the photographs, fragmenting, transposing and layering them. Simple, familiar images thus give rise to astonishingly poetic, mysterious and complex works with a “through the looking glass” feel. “I like provoking people to create new relationships, and get them to interact differently with their surroundings,” she says. Chamandy combines old and new, using bits of film, often black and-white negatives, which she enlarges digitally. The final photographs are huge – four to six feet wide – which envelop the viewer. “My work translates the complexity with which I view the world, how I see this great puzzle called life.” Photography is not enough to slake this artist’s thirst for self- expression, which is why sculpture plays an equally important role in her life. Bijou is Chamandy’s latest creation, a bronze piece inspired by the female form. It is a hymn to beauty, elegance and sensuality, not without spirituality, whose clean, stylized lines pay tribute to the power of femininity. Her love of contemporary art, colour and aesthetic harmony is also expressed through interior design, another point on Chamandy’s creative continuum. “The challenges are the same,” she says. “I seek a perfect balance between proportion, shape and colour. Design is like creating an oversized work of art. My signature? I would say a warm, simple, elegant minimalism that transcends time.” The owner of Galerie NuEdge, in the fashionable Golden Square Mile neighbourhood of Montreal, Amel Chamandy is also an avid art collector. She trusts in her talent for unearthing artists with a highly personal signature, admitting to a preference for colourful abstracts. Her gallery represents a dozen artists with local and international backgrounds. Driven by the challenge to promote her artists and art in general, she dreams of the day when Montreal, as a capital of creativity, becomes the central hub for the arts in North America.

Nothing less.