JENNIFER LATOUR
Jennifer Latour is a self taught artist based in Vancouver whose practice moves between photography, sculpture, and material performance. Before turning to the camera, she spent nearly two decades working internationally in special effects makeup for film and television, an experience that sharpened her sensitivity to structure, gesture, and the expressive potential of the handmade. Since 2006 she has developed a visual language that merges cinematic perception with sculptural invention, resulting in images that feel at once biological, archeological, and entirely speculative.
Latour’s imaginative foundations trace back to early illustrated narratives and the visual intensity of music videos, influences that expanded during a formative period in the United Kingdom. The city’s improvisational atmosphere catalyzed a mode of making that is both instinctive and rigorously composed. These sensibilities underpin Bound Species, the ongoing series that first brought wide recognition to her work. Initiated during the early months of the 2020 lockdown, the series begins with ephemeral botanical assemblages constructed from locally sourced flowers and plant material. Latour balances, carves, splices, and engineers these hybrid organisms with a precision shaped by her special effects background, crafting forms that appear animated by their own internal intelligence.
In an era marked by digital manipulation and AI driven image making, Latour’s insistence on constructing each species entirely by hand situates her within a lineage of artists who explore the tension between natural order and imaginative projection. Her work carries conceptual resonance with Karl Blossfeldt’s typological studies and Joan Fontcuberta’s speculative natural histories, while also echoing the intuitive engineering and performative balance found in the constructions of Alexander Calder. Like Calder’s mobiles, her assemblages depend on equilibrium, weight, and a quiet choreography of form in space, heightening their sense of imminent movement and unstable vitality.
Latour’s practice has also extended beyond the studio and gallery into the public realm. In collaboration with Aritzia, she created new large-scale sculptural installations that were featured prominently in window displays across Canada and the United States. These monumental works interpret her more abstract Shapeshifters series, translating their freestanding legs and Mondrian-like arms into architectural forms that occupy space with a bold physical presence.
Wild Species advances her inquiry into the landscapes of British Columbia, placing her mythological floral beings directly within forests, clearings, and open-air environments. These works are charged with ecological awareness, reflecting on resilience, vulnerability, and the increasingly urgent need to reconsider the relationship between human activity and the environments it shapes. They encourage a renewed intimacy with the natural world, while the fragility of the sculptures underscores the interdependence at the core of all living systems.
Across her series, Latour’s forms possess an unmistakable individuality, yet they participate in a shared biological logic that evokes the interconnectedness of life. Her species function as temporary emissaries from a parallel ecology, suggesting that evolution is as much conceptual as it is natural. Latour’s work proposes that renewal is intrinsic to life, and that transformation remains one of nature’s most enduring creative forces.
