Interior and the collectors is pleased to present COLLECTION N°9, RAPIDO, RAPIDO, a new group show in a vintage folding carvan at Camping Domaine Le Midi, Barbâtre, Noirmoutier Island (FR).
COLLECTION n°9 Rapido, Rapido
With Martin Belou / Pierre Clément / Julie Escoffier / Laura Gozlan / Gregor Hildebrandt / Ella Mievovsky / Fay Nicolson / Adrien Vescovi / Marnie Weber
Curators : Christel Montury / Fabien Villon
8-31. August, 2018
Interior and the collectors in Noirmoutier island (FR), Domaine Le Midi, Barbâtre
Few month ago, we found a 70’s folding caravan, the Rapido. It’s a mythical model, awarded at the french Lépine contest for its astute deployment. Inside it, we showcase a new summer show at a campsite on the Atlantic coast. We use this temporary habitat to develop an exhibition with limited space constraints. The project is set up between a tiny house and a traveling museum. All available spaces are used, the structure of the caravan, camping materials (canvas, foldable and removable furniture, extra light...) and the natural environment. Exhibiting in a campsite is a way to show art into a context in which the public is not used to experiencing it. A campsite is like a village, with its paths, its infrastructure, its rules and its specificities. Our space has the same look as any other homes. By integrating it into this ephemeral life, we affect the inhabitants within their own habitat, offering them the possibility of reappropriating works with more freedom than in a museum space. There is no theme, only the constraints of space guide the different proposals. Nevertheless, all the works are in connection with the idea of a journey, an initiation rite, transformation and time passing.
Martin Belou (born in 1986) creates performative situations and experiences using the elements: earth, water, air and fire. Led by intuition and a kind of artisanal know-how, he combines sculptures, drawings and organic materials (mushrooms, spices, wood, metal, stone, charcoal ...) in installations that often speak of the universal notions related to manual work, tradition and community. He showcases here a new work, a glitter and primitive mobile that welcomes the viewer with metallic noise.
Pierre Clément (b.1981, french). Incorporating found objects and simple industrial materials, his sculptural configurations challenge an established logic of signs, tools, and systems. He reveals the many frameworks we have developed to manage the world, and exposes their absurdity. His work Mobil unit (2017) can be unfolded in different dimensions following the available place.
Julie Escoffier (b.1989, french). Her work is based on principles of photography, though, rather than simply using a camera to capture the likeness of her subject, Escoffier takes cues from the material aspects of photography: light, chemicals and physical transformation. This new set of works are mainly realised with photosensitive chemical and plaster. Cast objects infused with organic dyes slowly change their hues over the course of the exhibition. Some pieces have melted in the sun, and in others their color has leached out. Even viewers don’t have complete control over their own viewing experience, as the dust of the trampled plaster inescapably coats pant legs and shoes, remaining with the viewers long after they depart from this fragile, otherworldly landscape.
Laura Gozlan (b.1979, french). Her artistic practice revolves around experimental films, videos and visual installations gathering together documents, sculptures and models. She takes ownership of images she borrows from genre cinema and scientific film that she then rearranges when editing. She’s particularly interested in scientific utopias and the communities they build, with a keen interest in how they are represented in cinema sub-genres. Her work explores the links there are between counterculture and posthumanism, their founding myths (New-age, cybernetics) and their dystopias.
Gregor Hildebrandt (b.1974, german). His paintings, sculptures and installations draw on music, cinema and underground cultures, arranging and combining visual elements of sound recordings and various recording media such as magnetic tapes, vinyl records or compact disks. Throughout his poetic work, infused with both sound and silence, Hildebrandt creates a wide range of subtly reflective compositions that invite the viewer to evolve in space and grasp the beauty of things past. He showcases a new site specific work, a curtain-door made with red cassette tape. Following the wether, daylight and wind, the tapes have always another aspect, from a dark brown to a shiny red, from straight lines to an organic form.
Ella Mievovsky (b. 1990, russian/french) questions our perception of images through new technologies. She mainly works by hacking surveillance cameras in an obsessive on-going process. She extracts pictures through the omnipotent point of view of cameras and she fixes it on canvas with oil painting. Despite the constraint of framing that she can’t always choose, she become her own filter of reality. She lingers for a long time on the same place to capture any kind of activity, scrutinize the variations of light, colors or the technical accidents of the camera. Both process and result are deeply based on a pictural approach.
Fay Nicolson (b.1984, english) plays with the physicality of images and possibilities for formal and material transformation through repetition. Notions of process, documentation, narrative and abstraction weave throughout her practice, with final works existing as fragments of a wider aesthetic project. She combines silk-screen stencils with paint to develop a visual lexicon of gestures and marks derived from photographs of rippled fabric, isolated limbs or digital brush marks. These are combined in different variations on unstretched canvas to create works that are reminiscent of textiles, abstract paintings or visual scores. She presents ta new costume and wo site specific paintings on the windbreakers of the caravan.
Adrien Vescovi (b.1981, french) makes paintings by exposing multiple fabrics to outdoor conditions; the weather then causes several processes on the textile: like Sun-whitening and ripping, and dye will drop and leak in between fabrics. Time makes paintings, or might the Earth have made the paintings? We are the new hippies is a nice way to say it. Vescovi crafts the stretcher for his paintings, that now include elements of carpentry, such as the hinges of a window or a door; there is a bench from where to look to the painting from.
Marnie Weber (b.1958, american) is a multi-media artist who works in film, performance, music, collage, sculpture and installation. Her early films are short poetic narratives in which Weber performs in costume as the primary character interacting with objects and props. This persona is often derived from a character she performed as on stage, starting in the late 80’s, 90’s until quite recently. Weber is the director of all films, and creates all the costumes, props, sets and soundtracks. The later films are more complex and encompass other characters, and people in costumes with which she interacts with along the way. There is an intentional homemade quality to the films and innoncence and naïveté are embraced in her overall aesthetic. By creating her own mythology of creatures, animals and female
ABOUT INTERIOR AND THE COLLECTORS
INTERIOR and the collectors is an artist run-space in Lyon founded by Christel Montury and Fabien Villon. It’s not a conventional venue but an apartment in an old building in the center of Lyon that can be rented for one or several nights. The public is invited into a private space to show art in the intimacy of a flat which is not designed for it but for everyday life. Here, we become the collectors and we choose the artists not through answering to a particular topic or problematic but with a more personal logic that lets us mix different genders and combine emerging with established artists. A private space gives us the possibility of total freedom, a local and dense exchange that builds on the fondations of a multicultural and meaningful art, another way to see an exhibition. We are organising more and more projects some projects outside Lyon, in France and abroad. Last April, we occupied the luxury hotel Amigo in Brussels during the fair. A way for us to experience the inhabited space as an exhibition space with other constraints. This summer we try out another format, a vintage folding carvan that could be move elsewhere.
Photo: Christel Montury