On The Road In Tennessee by Jacques Gautreau
June 4-25, 2021
On The Road In Tennessee by Jacques Gautreau
Opening reception: Friday, June 4, 5:00-8:00 PM
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday 9 AM – 5 PM
On The Road In Tennessee by Jacques Gautreau in the lower gallery
The road is a fitting theme not just for this exposition of Jacques Gautreau’s work, but also for his life so far. Since he was a kid, he has followed his instinct to get away and explore. When he was still in his teens, he inherited his grandfather’s Solex motorcycle – pretty much a bicycle with a tiny engine – left his home in a Loire Valley village near Angers, and took off for Spain. He got part of the way up a mountain in the Pyrenees before the Solex gave out.
With the money he had saved for that trip but didn’t get to use, he bought his first camera. Not knowing if he was really an artist – though he had already demonstrated talent in painting and music – he expanded his technical interest in how cameras work, to how they helped him interpret the spaces around him. At home or in the countryside, or at the Breton beach where his family spent summers, he roamed on foot and recorded the depth and poignance of scenes other people viewed as ordinary, if they noticed them at all.
His biography for this event mentions that he would go on to travel throughout his adulthood, taking his camera along to find those extraordinary elements of quotidien existence in places as disparate as Ecuador and Hong Kong. That drive to keep moving eventually landed him in Knoxville, Tennessee, around a pivotal time in its history.
Downtown Knoxville was “changing fast,” he told the Metro Pulse a few years later in a story about his work, and he was there most mornings, walking through its streets and alleyways as desolate, industrial ruins were being transformed into something clean and prosperous. That change was incidental to something more interesting to his eye: the light, the lines, the textures of remnants left behind. Even as he captured these artifacts, he moved with the times, and it was in Knoxville that he expanded his method from black and white photography to color, and his medium from film to digital.
And he expanded his territory. In the exposition’s title, he describes a “recurrent road trip” because it is part of his process as an artist to venture out to the parts of Tennessee that people drive past without noticing. There is intimacy, empathy and humor in his embrace of this part of America that he now calls his home. In this gallery, you will find the people and places you’ve seen and maybe missed, the people and places that give Tennessee its cultural distinction.
Jacques Gautreau began his career in photography as a teenager growing up near Angers, France. He has made photographs in locations on six continents, from Mexico to Mauritius to Tasmania. His career in medical imaging technology brought him from Paris to Knoxville in 2004. He has published his work in several anthologies, including Knoxville, Green by Nature (2013). He has shown his work in several exhibitions since his 2006 Knoxville premiere at the Emporium: Knoxville Through French Eyes. His work has been awarded by the Arts and Culture Alliance, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, and Knox Heritage, and twice by the Slow Exposures Exhibition for Photography in the Rural South. Gautreau became a U.S. citizen in 2016 and lives in Knoxville with his wife, Julie Gautreau.