OTIUM #3
June 21–September 9, 2018
The IAC becomes, from time to time, a space for Otium, an intermediary lapse of time conducive to thinking, meditation and awareness. The gardens, like the spaces inside the IAC are the open, hosting projects that have been developed in an elsewhere, that will become, for the length of a summer, a here.
Otium #3 collects the work of three artists, Jean-Marie Perdrix, Linda Sanchez, Dane Mitchell, who each have in common this idea of seizing matter as the foundation of their work. Mineral, organic and cosmic matter, volatile and in movement, is explored by each one of these artists, experimenting with its possibilities in different ways.
Approached in a cosmomorphic manner, this matter is as much an issue of human activities as of nature, since such a distinction no longer has any meaning. Seeking consistency, these artists use experiments and experiences as a way of producing their artistic forms. It is in this way that they intend to create and establish links with the environment, as if to intensify their relationship with what is.
Jean-Marie Perdrix
Imagined in close connection with their production sites, the artworks of Jean-Marie Perdrix take the experience of a territory as their primary source. For the last 20 years in Burkina Faso, Perdrix has collected totemic objects, skulls, animal pelts, household waste and other scraps, that he makes into the matrixes of his transformations. With his sculptures of “lost flesh,” modeled after animals that have been slaughtered for the food industry and through the creation of the co-operative Yamba-D devoted to the production of school tables made using melted plastic waste, Perdrix has established a practice on the edges of craftsmanship.
Linda Sanchez
The sculptural, graphic and video work of Linda Sanchez draws its material origins from the very heart of water, sand, clay, lichen and also from physical phenomena that sometimes fixes them in place, while other times it sets them in motion. Constrained by that which envelopes or fragilizes, models or dissolves it, matter is experimented with, with neither fascination nor preciosity, and the movement is captured using different systems of observation and measurement (transversal cuts, use of a specific apparatus for capturing, grading and framing).
Dane Mitchell
Based on natural elements (light, rain, steam), the work of New Zealand artist Dane Mitchell tends to transcend our manner of perceiving these manifestations and to explore the limits of our perceptions. Poetic and discrete, Mitchell’s artworks emerge from a caption, from fixing organic and fleeting substances. Sometimes accompanied by scientific apparatus (parabola, pumps, equipment for making measurements), sometimes transformed (metal allots, perfume), the materials employed are subjected to a number of experiments by way of subtle sensorial systems (vaporization of an odor, occultation of sight, lures) or through their reconfiguration in space (contextual shifts, playing with scales).
Curator: Nathalie Ergino
assisted by Juliette Tyran
