Samuel Arsenault-Brassard is an XR artist, architect, and photographer based in Montreal. After 8.5 years studying architecture at Carleton University and Algonquin College, he developed an artistic practice centered on VR sculpture, speculative architecture, and the mastery of light as a primary material.
His environments, entirely hand-sculpted in VR using controllers, explore the interactions between light, space, and materiality, drawing on Louis Kahn's natural light, James Turrell's light installations, and Edmund Burke's philosophy of the sublime.
In parallel, his photographic practice documents the hidden architecture of sexual spaces and the archetypes of Montreal's kink communities, using the same Baroque lighting language that defines his virtual worlds: saturated color emerging from deep darkness, revealing form through light.
He has exhibited at Galerie ELLEPHANT (ELEKTRA Festival), Galerie Art Mûr, Museum of Other Realities, and MURAL Festival. As a curator, he programmed 15 VR/AR exhibitions at Galerie Art Mûr, Galerie ELLEPHANT, and MURAL Festival (2020–2022). He has delivered over 30 lectures at UQAM, HEAD Genève, University of Tennessee, Mutek, Art Toronto, and Papier Art Fair.
Currently completing Gloam, the most technically ambitious VR artwork ever made: ~16,000 lightmaps simulating a full solar cycle inside hand-sculpted virtual architecture.
My practice is built on a single obsession: the way light transforms space into feeling.
I sculpt architecture by hand in virtual reality: vast, cave-like structures shaped gesture by gesture with VR controllers, the way a potter works clay. These are not modeled on a screen with a mouse. They are danced into existence, each form a trace of my body's movement through digital space. The resulting environments are too complex, too organic, too large to exist in the physical world. They exist only as places you can enter and inhabit.
My flagship work, Gloam (Entre chien et loup), pushes this practice to its limit. A monumental VR installation, it simulates a full cycle of natural light across a hand-sculpted cave architecture using approximately 16,000 lightmaps rendered at 8K resolution — an unprecedented approach to lighting in VR. The light does not illuminate the space; it is the space.
Parallel to my digital practice, I photograph the hidden architectures of intimacy (BDSM spaces, bathhouses, dungeons) and the people who inhabit them. These are real spaces where light, darkness, concealment, and revelation shape human experience as powerfully as any cathedral. The photography is not separate from the VR work. Both are investigations of the same question: how does the architecture of a space, its light, its scale, its darkness, act on the body and the psyche?
In VR, I build impossible refuges flooded with impossible light. In photography, I document real refuges shaped by real darkness. The thread between them is the architecture of intimacy, rendered in light.
Ma pratique repose sur une seule obsession : la manière dont la lumière transforme l'espace en sensation.
Je sculpte de l'architecture à la main en réalité virtuelle : de vastes structures organiques, semblables à des cavernes, façonnées geste par geste avec des contrôleurs VR, comme un potier travaille l'argile. Ces formes ne sont pas modélisées à l'écran avec une souris. Elles naissent d'une danse, chaque forme étant la trace du mouvement de mon corps dans l'espace numérique.
Mon oeuvre phare, Gloam (Entre chien et loup), pousse cette pratique à ses limites. Installation monumentale en réalité virtuelle, elle simule un cycle complet de lumière naturelle à travers une architecture cavernaire sculptée à la main, utilisant environ 16 000 lightmaps rendues en résolution 8K — une approche sans précédent de l'éclairage en VR. La lumière n'illumine pas l'espace; elle est l'espace.
Parallèlement à ma pratique numérique, je photographie les architectures cachées de l'intimité (espaces BDSM, saunas, donjons) et les personnes qui les habitent. Ce sont des espaces réels où la lumière, l'obscurité, la dissimulation et la révélation façonnent l'expérience humaine aussi puissamment que n'importe quelle cathédrale.
En VR, je construis des refuges impossibles inondés d'une lumière impossible. En photographie, je documente des refuges réels façonnés par une obscurité réelle. Le fil conducteur est l'architecture de l'intimité, rendue en lumière.
Available for exhibitions, commissions, and gallery collaborations.