This Way Please: Laura St.Pierre "This End Up" and Shelley Miller "Scopophilia" at Galerie Articule
Frankly it has been (mostly) an excellent programmation at Articule
since September 2005 throughout their cluster of exhibits on the theme
of immersion.
You have one week left to see these 2 excellent works now playing
by Laura St Pierre and Shelley Miller.
Both juggle with ideas of high and low consumption,
evoking ideals of desire with material leftovers.
It's not as if we're trying these days to dig any new topic:
everything have been tried. But they are specifities in the works
of both these artists that make their efforts worth their propositions.
Shelley Miller, an artist whose been playing with ice sugar since
a good while (I remember those wonderful pastries decorations that she had spread
as graffities across this city's walls a few years back), presents cakes
made to replicate purses and other accessories from Louis Vuitton.
There are a couple cakes half-eaten on a tiny podium (I suppose visitors
are able to eat some of it but I didn't dare), one full presentation window
with 3 other ice sugar Vuitton purses in mint condition (she even faked the
bricked walls of bourgeois shops architecture), and a couple photographs
imitating the publicity ads made by this french company (well, maybe ads made 20 years ago). (Well...ok...maybe not that old)
You don't need a whole essay about dutch Vanitas to get the idea
of where this art is going, but what the press release won't tell you
is that this art is especially critical and pinpointing at an aftereffect of the artworld, when Vuitton and Prada are probably the only fashion companies to have ads among gallery ads in big international art magazines (her ads I find look even more like Prada ads), very certainly because both companies, while still using much of conventions in how they attempt to appeal to their clients, also draw a lot
of sponsoring toward the new artists and architects "du moment".
Not even mentioning that Murakami had reversed pop art on its head by
doing canvas of Vuitton logos at the companys (and probably, their
clients') demand, Vuitton is often lending their vitrine arrangements
to half-careered artists such as Ugo Undigone.
The interesting strategy that Miller used for her work
is providing an ouroboros: it is in how she displays a cycle between
an object of desire disappearing while it is being consumed
and its wanton image making certain that once it is gone,
the viewer will be wanting more. This is especially prevalent
considering the amount of abid Vuitton collectors, who
will go through a lot of effort to find every models
of the company's purses though they are designed with the same
egocentric logo since more than a century.
This works is in desperate need to be sent to New York.
In the next room, Laura St Pierre presents yet another exhibit
engulfing the recent trend (or revival) of "sprawling art".
It's excellent. Not nearly as great as the landmark "A L'Abri
Des Arbres" (2001) de BGL, but I find it honoring to compare the approach.
Because, contrarely to other popular artists like Phoebe Washburn
who use the sprawling aesthetic to convey everyday residues
into formal assemblages of abstract functions, Ms St.Pierre is
also interested (like Shelley Miller) by the blunt critique.
But unlike with Miller the press release couldn't be more blunt either:
this is exactly described as what it is, a decorative installation made with
residues of domestic commodities, that is, the usual styrofoams
stuff that you will find in boxes when you buy all sorts of home equipments
(be them technologic or not), and the leftovers of general home decoration
(wallpapers, paint, various thrash).
They are arranged to form sort of a marecage, almost as if this world had slowly started to evolve from its own. Maybe the homeland
of parasites in a microbiologic world, but things are not that simple:
this work is not meant to revulse the viewer. Once a play with lightspots
is triggered, the room change in color temperature, and at some points
when it comes totally dark (this use of lightning change made me really think of BGL), you discover that red-lava light is coming from underneat the pules of styrofoams. From the mundane of domestic you are transported into the exoticism of inner or outer worlds.
So where in the world am I coming from with "critique" when I've been travelling this far?
Well, hoping you won't find this interpretation too weak, I do
feel like this work funtions as the evanescence of post-human ecologia,
prophetizing the doom of a natural world being shaped by our
everyday consumer lopsidednesses, never fully able to apprehend the darkness
inherent in every faces of beauty.
Go see that show,
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
Laura St.Pierre: "This End Up"
Shelly Miller: "Scopophilia"
4 march – 9 april 2006
Suite # 105 of 4001 rue Berri
Montreal, Canada
Wed-Sun 12h-5h pm
since September 2005 throughout their cluster of exhibits on the theme
of immersion.
You have one week left to see these 2 excellent works now playing
by Laura St Pierre and Shelley Miller.
Both juggle with ideas of high and low consumption,
evoking ideals of desire with material leftovers.
It's not as if we're trying these days to dig any new topic:
everything have been tried. But they are specifities in the works
of both these artists that make their efforts worth their propositions.
Shelley Miller, an artist whose been playing with ice sugar since
a good while (I remember those wonderful pastries decorations that she had spread
as graffities across this city's walls a few years back), presents cakes
made to replicate purses and other accessories from Louis Vuitton.
There are a couple cakes half-eaten on a tiny podium (I suppose visitors
are able to eat some of it but I didn't dare), one full presentation window
with 3 other ice sugar Vuitton purses in mint condition (she even faked the
bricked walls of bourgeois shops architecture), and a couple photographs
imitating the publicity ads made by this french company (well, maybe ads made 20 years ago). (Well...ok...maybe not that old)
You don't need a whole essay about dutch Vanitas to get the idea
of where this art is going, but what the press release won't tell you
is that this art is especially critical and pinpointing at an aftereffect of the artworld, when Vuitton and Prada are probably the only fashion companies to have ads among gallery ads in big international art magazines (her ads I find look even more like Prada ads), very certainly because both companies, while still using much of conventions in how they attempt to appeal to their clients, also draw a lot
of sponsoring toward the new artists and architects "du moment".
Not even mentioning that Murakami had reversed pop art on its head by
doing canvas of Vuitton logos at the companys (and probably, their
clients') demand, Vuitton is often lending their vitrine arrangements
to half-careered artists such as Ugo Undigone.
The interesting strategy that Miller used for her work
is providing an ouroboros: it is in how she displays a cycle between
an object of desire disappearing while it is being consumed
and its wanton image making certain that once it is gone,
the viewer will be wanting more. This is especially prevalent
considering the amount of abid Vuitton collectors, who
will go through a lot of effort to find every models
of the company's purses though they are designed with the same
egocentric logo since more than a century.
This works is in desperate need to be sent to New York.
In the next room, Laura St Pierre presents yet another exhibit
engulfing the recent trend (or revival) of "sprawling art".
It's excellent. Not nearly as great as the landmark "A L'Abri
Des Arbres" (2001) de BGL, but I find it honoring to compare the approach.
Because, contrarely to other popular artists like Phoebe Washburn
who use the sprawling aesthetic to convey everyday residues
into formal assemblages of abstract functions, Ms St.Pierre is
also interested (like Shelley Miller) by the blunt critique.
But unlike with Miller the press release couldn't be more blunt either:
this is exactly described as what it is, a decorative installation made with
residues of domestic commodities, that is, the usual styrofoams
stuff that you will find in boxes when you buy all sorts of home equipments
(be them technologic or not), and the leftovers of general home decoration
(wallpapers, paint, various thrash).
They are arranged to form sort of a marecage, almost as if this world had slowly started to evolve from its own. Maybe the homeland
of parasites in a microbiologic world, but things are not that simple:
this work is not meant to revulse the viewer. Once a play with lightspots
is triggered, the room change in color temperature, and at some points
when it comes totally dark (this use of lightning change made me really think of BGL), you discover that red-lava light is coming from underneat the pules of styrofoams. From the mundane of domestic you are transported into the exoticism of inner or outer worlds.
So where in the world am I coming from with "critique" when I've been travelling this far?
Well, hoping you won't find this interpretation too weak, I do
feel like this work funtions as the evanescence of post-human ecologia,
prophetizing the doom of a natural world being shaped by our
everyday consumer lopsidednesses, never fully able to apprehend the darkness
inherent in every faces of beauty.
Go see that show,
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
Laura St.Pierre: "This End Up"
Shelly Miller: "Scopophilia"
4 march – 9 april 2006
Suite # 105 of 4001 rue Berri
Montreal, Canada
Wed-Sun 12h-5h pm
posted by Cedric at 12:04 AM
2 Comments:
Howdy!
When were you there?
I obviously missed you at the vernissage.
Hello Chris,
Oh my.... I'm the last person you will see at a vernissage! I don't even go to museums ones even if I got the invite. Sometimes I attend artist talks.
Cheers !
Cedric
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