| The Swiss-born artist Mai-Thu Perret has recently become known for her multi-disciplinary practice encompassing sculpture, painting, video, and installation art. Drawing on the revolutionary potential of modernism, she has created a complex oeuvre that combines radical feminist politics with literary utopian texts and homemade crafts. Perret has exhibited in shows such as Apocalypse Ballet at the Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin and Land of Crystal at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht. In 2006, she was the subject of a major solo exhibition, And Every Woman Will be a Walking Synthesis of the Universe, which was featured at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, and at the Centre d’art contemporain in Geneva. |  |
Emma Dexter
Mai-Thu Perret’s imagined communes and remembered histories are the focus of two recent international exhibitions.
The Swiss-born artist Mai-Thu Perret has recently become known for her multi-disciplinary practice encompassing sculpture, painting, video, and installation art. Drawing on the revolutionary potential of modernism, she has created a complex oeuvre that combines radical feminist politics with literary utopian texts and homemade crafts.
Perret has exhibited in shows such as Apocalypse Ballet at the Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin and Land of Crystal at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht. In 2006, she was the subject of a major solo exhibition, And Every Woman Will be a Walking Synthesis of the Universe, which was featured at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, and at the Centre d’art contemporain in Geneva. What links Perret’s work in each of these exhibitions is her fascination with mystical phenomena, her interest in 20th Century avant-garde aesthetics, and her master narrative, The Crystal Frontier, which began as a journal in 1999.
Fragmentary, diaristic and avowedly utopian, The Crystal Frontier details the imaginary lives of an all-female, radically minded community who have retreated from capitalist society and relocated somewhere in the New Arizona desert. Initially contained in diary entries and letters, the project grew to incorporate sculptures, paintings, handcrafted ceramics, performances, films, posters, mannequins, furniture, and banners. Proposed as prototypical objects, these diverse creations represent the collective output of the members of the imagined commune.
Bikini, Perret’s recent exhibition at the Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin, sees the artist moving slightly away from the references to Constructivism and the other avant-gardes contained within The Crystal Frontier’s narrative. The exhibition examines the celebration surrounding America’s first post-war atom bomb launched in 1946 on Bikini Atoll. Perret’s plaster sculptures are based upon the cakes made at the time to commemorate the tests, which occurred just after the bikini was named for the skimpy two piece swimming costume launched by French designer Louis Re’ard.
For her first solo London exhibition at Timothy Taylor Gallery in September, Mai-Thu Perret deals with similar themes and presents a new body of work in the form of glazed ceramic wall reliefs. An extension of a series begun in 2003, they continue an investigation into clichés, archetypes, references, and individual voices. These works, presented in an array of shapes, are an inventory of forms and symbols, figurative and abstract. Perret is fascinated by the dualistic nature of ceramics – the original clay is organic and pliable matter, later transformed into an unyielding and fragile substance. Through its moulds and indentations, the clay bears traces of trapped history, becoming something like a fossil. ïâ¬Â°
