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My art history studies in France made me aware of a number of complex integrations of visual, performance and music-based art forms. Since I moved to New York, I have become interested in the idea of encountering places, fallen boundaries and unusual translations. The abundance of art in New York, the countless studio visits and the numberless interactions that I have had with people have all opened my eyes to many fields that are new to me, such as illustration, but I cannot help thinking that becoming a curator in exile (going from one known world to another daunting and exciting one while trying to create my own universe within a new territory) has influenced my vision of art. |
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The Troubled Waters of Permeability! – Hélianthe Bourdeaux-Maurin
My art history studies in France made me aware of a number of complex integrations of visual, performance and music-based art forms. Since I moved to New York, I have become interested in the idea of encountering places, fallen boundaries and unusual translations. The abundance of art in New York, the countless studio visits and the numberless interactions that I have had with people have all opened my eyes to many fields that are new to me, such as illustration, but I cannot help thinking that becoming a curator in exile (going from one known world to another daunting and exciting one while trying to create my own universe within a new territory) has influenced my vision of art.
This project is also linked to art history. It seems to me that the permeability between fields as ostensibly opposed as art and science or technology and illustration provide an increasingly significant arena for consideration within the context of contemporary art practice. For example, as technology has become a necessary and obsessed-over component of our present lives—playing both benevolent and negative roles—it is not surprising that it has inspired much artistic creation and reflection.
Since the 70s, artists have been striving to transform everyday life into an art form in and of itself. “Art is what makes life more interesting than art” said Robert Filliou. At the same time, narrative has slowly re-entered the realm of the fine arts since the 80s, after being somewhat banished for more than half a century. In order to explore storytelling in new artistic formats, fine art borrows from the efficient tools of illustration and moviemaking. Crossing boundaries between genres and fields also seems to proceed from a recent democratization of art, particularly of certain media such as photography and video, but equally from the explosion of availability of ever-greater arrays of affordable possibilities and choices within our modern societies.
“The Troubled Waters of Permeability!” as presented at Parker’s Box, where I also am Associate Director, features 14 international artists from Algeria, France, Germany, Ireland and Korea, alongside American artists with diverse backgrounds including Chinese, Indian and European. I deeply believe in the talent of the artists included in all my exhibitions and I never forget how much every curator owes his or her artists—no matter how difficult or ungrateful they can be. Without them, we as curators, regardless of all the power that we feel we have, would never exist.
I choose artworks the way I choose the people I love: bolts from the blue, instantaneous and indescribable connections. Both David McQueen and Electronic Shadow (a collaborative group whose works are on display here for the first time in an American gallery) hybridize technology, nature, architecture and the human presence while imbuing their creations with an element of poetry. Some works of art are not always what they seem: Caroline McCarthy’s photography or Yazid Oulab’s videos (also shown here in the States for the first time) oscillate between sculpture, performance, painting and even incantation. What the viewer sees in both of these artists’ works is mostly a trace of an ephemeral process, activity or construct. Géraldine Pastor-Lloret, Chitra Ganesh and Fay Ku’s works walk the edges of illustration through the forms that they invent and twist as well as through their use of cryptic and fascinating narratives based on cultural and personal myths or stories.
Aesthetically extremely diverse, Jeremy Bronson and David Bronson generate captivating surrealistic and complete universes consisting of videos, illustration works, animation, drawings, sculptures and installations. Both Soyeon Cho and Pamela Hadfield use elements that are mundane (everyday-life objects, food substances) and transforms them into surprising and touching beauties: whether pure or tainted with their contrariness. Nora Krug (who confronts Borgès in the work that she displays in the show) and Paul Hoppe are renowned illustrators. The quality and scale of their works crosses, de facto, any possible aesthetic or mental frontier. Finally, Patrick Martinez handles ambiguity as an art and develops a complex, strong, tragic and humoristic drawing practice through video: a medium that seems so far from drawing itself.
With the awareness of the dangers and paradoxes generated by such a subject, “The Troubled Waters of Permeability!” explores the diverse practices embracing transgression through an arsenal of weapons that favor beauty and subtlety over agressivity and provocation… In the end, contemporary art seem to be part of a humanistic movement (in the 18th century sense of the word) to engage in a simultaneous exploration of what it means to be an artist, at the same time as being a complete human being, fully open to the world and its potential.
