all we need is a preacher and a motel
dal 3/12/2001 al 5/1/2002
Segnalato da
Par Broman
Stuart Croft
Per Huttner
Valerie Mrejen
Stephanie Nava
Charles Labelle
Jemima Stehli
3/12/2001
all we need is a preacher and a motel
Friche la Belle de mai, Tour-Panorama, Marseille
...brings together seven critically acclaimed international artists from Marseille, Paris, London, Los Angeles and Stockholm for an exhibition about the implications of these three short words.
Par Broman, Stockholm
Stuart Croft, London
Per Huttner, Stockholm
Valerie Mrejen, Paris
Stephanie Nava, Marseille
Charles Labelle, Los Angeles
Jemima Stehli, London
Curated by Per Hüttner
'I love you...' three small and inconspicuous words. '...all we need is a
preacher and a motel...' brings together seven critically acclaimed
international artists from Marseille, Paris, London, Los Angeles and
Stockholm for an exhibition about the implications of these three short
words.
We are bombarded with images of the ideal relationship, the perfect
love, the happy family, undying sexual desire - in films, advertising,
music and the press. All the work in this exhibition is coloured by these
idealised images of love and are thus expressions of the appealing and
the beautiful. But the subject matter of each of the works deals with
the unbearable suffering inflicted when love is denied, or situations
where sexual desire is used to suppress a greater emotional pain. It is in
this tension between surface and content where the exhibition gains its
momentum.
Jemima Stehli's large photographic self-portraits are a perfect example of
this dichotomy. Appealing and mystically beautiful, they speak of
abandonment. They portray the loss of love and the personal crises that
naturally follows that denial - as we even degrade ourselves in a last,
hopeless attempt to regain love.
Where Stehli approaches abandonment from a subjective standpoint,
Charles LaBelle invites us to ponder the privacy of total strangers made
public. He has produced three womens' dresses from the fabric of
mattresses found in the street. What private joys and traumas took
place on those mattresses before they were turned into three womens'
dresses - ready to tempt and seduce?
Like LaBelle, Stephanie Nava's drawings are also concerned with objects.
In her case, objects are literally the glue that holds lovers together - or
sets them apart. The entity created by two people and an object is
totally removed from an existing context and it is unclear if this
cocooning is a curse or a blessing. These ambiguities in Nava's drawings
show how love has become coloured by and intricately interwoven with
consumer culture.
Stories about love and death make up the most archaic forms of
narrative. Valérie Mréjen, Stuart Croft and Per Hüttner all approach this
tradition using different points of departure. Mréjen has taken the
narrative of seduction and turned it on its head. A woman describes how
is she is seduced. She does this in the most bored fashion imaginable.
The obvious comedy of the piece gains further strength by our
knowledge of how the other party, the man, undoubtedly will boast
about his 'conquest' to his friends. Hüttner also plays with romantic
notions in his series of photographs. By placing a clearly contemporary
Quasimodo in Beverly Hills he merges a romantic literary tradition with
the irony and nihilism of Hollywood culture. The outcome is both sad and
funny.
Stuart Croft's video merges the format of news media with that of
lowbudget cinema. In a deadpan fashion, not unlike that of Mréjen, he
paints a sad portrait of a man crushed under the yoke of the
responsibilities of fatherhood and sexual frustration. Love and desire are
merged in a lethal cocktail that unravels the darkest corners of the
human psyche.
Where Croft deals with death in a concrete way, Pär Broman uses the
ancient metaphorical link between death and the orgasm. Broman has
photographed three men's faces as they have an orgasm. The artist's
interest lies in the lack of control that the models have over their facial
expressions under these circumstances. His photographs, like the
exhibition as a whole, is an attempt to turn the hyper-real, yet bogus
'realism' of fashion photography inside-out. By accommodating the
ugliest, acknowledging the loss of control and embracing complexity
each of the participating artists attempts to attain another form of
'truth' and represent another form of 'realism'. The work in the exhibition
challenges mediated ideas about beauty and love and creates a surface
on which we can mirror the darker sides of our souls.
Image: Per Hüttner, 'The Hunchback in Beverly Hills', 2000, c-print, 110 x 110 cm
Galerie Friche de la Belle de Mai / 41, rue Jobin 13 003 Marseille