18/10/2002
Doug Aitken
Magasin, Grenoble
MAGASIN - Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble is showing the first solo exhibition in France of the young Califorian artist Doug Aitken, who was born in 1968 and lives and works in Los Angeles.
Aitken is known for both his photography and video installations, including the 1999 piece Electric Earth, for which he won the International Prize at the 1999 Venice Biennial. His combined technical mastery and poetic stance generate imposing sensual works that navigate in a limbo between the narrative and plotless rendering of a given subject while exploring the notions of presence, distance and memory. Time and space expand and contract for the elements and characters that inhabit the highly sophisticated and conceptual worlds Aitken creates, as our senses of perception are challenged when experiencing them.
THIS EXHIBITION, co-organized with Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, will occupy all of MAGASIN’s gallery spaces and concentrates on recent work.
It features the monumental video installation ''i am in you'', encased in a darkened and labyrinthine environment created by an enormous wooden construction (16 x 9 x 4 meters). In it, images projected onto 5 screens, along with a musical and spoken sound-track, reveal the activities and reflections of a young girl which propel us into and beyond her irrational and dreamlike universe.
''moving'', a sound and light installation deployed across a space nearly 40 meters long, engrosses us in an atmosphere dominated by the kind of taxilights used by airports to guide planes as they maneuver at night. ''these restless minds'' invites us to lose ourselves in the incomprehensible chanting of American auctioneers as their mercantile efforts slip into strange ritual-like incantations.
Three different kinds of photographic works accompany these installations. ''the mirror'' is a suite of 10 digital C-prints which features light reflecting off of rectangular sign posts. Are they avatars of hope, sending out signals of life into space from the banal and darkened urban landscapes they occupy? ''2-second separation'' is a monumental triptych showing a beach-wrecked ship which takes on the allure of a wounded and dying sea creature.
''rise'', a single 2 x 3 meters photograph housed in a light-box, offers us an illuminated metropolis at night, seen from above, both inviting and intimidating us with its twinkling lights and seemingly endless horizon.
Catalogue
"Rise", the catalogue edited by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, will be available in English.
Exhibition open from Tuesday to Sunday from 12:00 to 7:00 pm.
Entrance fee : 3,5 Euros, reduced 2 Euros
Free guided visits every Saturday and Sunday
MAGASIN - CENTRE NATIONAL D'ART CONTEMPORAIN
Site Bouchayer - Viallet 155 cours Berriat 38028 Grenoble Cedex 1 FRANCE