Over the years my proximity with the making of Artists’ projects urged me to accompany the production of these works.
I often encounter the early stages of the creation, during artists studios visits, artist residencies and festival premieres, and I witness a lot of things in the making, as well as unfinished projects, abandonned ideas.
As a producer I help bringing these ideas to existence, and as a curator I create a context that benefits both the artwork and the viewer.
STRP 2019 exhibition
Guest curator
A certain form of deliberate naivety
___ Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.
This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy.
Oscar Wilde,
“The Decay of Lying”
For its 2019 edition, STRP festival invites you to a have a glimpse at an exciting and unusual future, away from dystopian scenarios.
These artworks have in common a peculiar, sensitive approach, one that strives to find poetry in our daily life and uses collaboration with technology as a tool enabling us to create, dream and build.
As Olafur Eliasson said, “Art is a way to turn thinking into doing as well as connecting you with your senses, body and mind.”
Throughout participation and engagement, the visitors can experience first hand the results of shared dreams and alternate futures.
Meet with hermit crabs while they dress in unique 3D printed glass shells, grow entire cities by the power of your fingers, discover a natural landscape seen through the eyes of drones, or take a nap in the company of a lucid pillow, and walk around a live evolving futuristic vision of STRPS area.
A vision brought by an artist doesn’t have to follow any rule or physical constraints of reality, creating an out of this world environment.
An artwork involving technology can use inputs from the present reality of the audience, meaning it is people’s imagination that fuels the experience.
In strong contrast with distant looking digital based art, this exhibition shares a certain form of deliberate naivety, blurring out the physical presence of technology itself.
More about the artworks:
A creative and fruitful collaboration with technology can take so many forms.
In Atlas by Yann Deval and Marie Losseau, a simple gesture allow visitors to plant seeds growing into entire cities.
With Why Not Hand Over a “Shelter” to Hermit Crabs?, Japanese artist Aki Inomata uses very complex laser scan and 3D printing techniques to conceive de luxe particular glass shells she is proposing to hermit crabs. This collaboration between humans, nature and technology tells us a story about ourself and the universality of the concept of home and belonging.
Quayola presents his latest video work made within the isolated Swiss Vallée de Joux landscape. The piece is recorded, analyzed and transcribed with extreme precision by high-end drones. Seeing this world through the eyes of drones, we can understand it as a sum of thousand of hundreds of point clouds, close to how bats grasp their environment.
In her newly commissioned project, Waking Agents, American artist Lauren McCarthy invites visitors to take a nap with unconventional lucid pillows. She questions our intimate relationship with smart objects.
Take a guided tour in a futuristic version of STRPJS with Uninvited Guests and Duncan Speakman. Collective imagination and storytelling will transform into reality the possible future of this area. What better way to demonstrate that we are in control of creating our own tomorrow and have the power to direct its course?
Artists: Quayola, Yann Deval & Marie G.Losseau, Lauren McCarthy, Uninvited Guests & Duncan Speakman, Aki Inomata
Location: STRP Festival – Klokgebouw Eindhoven
Dates: March 30th – April 7th 2019
LIGHTSCAPES
At the crossroads of philosophical preoccupations, but also those, esthetic and theoretical, of contemporary art, Joanie Lemercier gives us with Lightscapes, a panorama of simulated realties and disturbing artificial landscapes.Moving from room to room, we discover the declensions of a particular imaginary, a particular obsession, that of mathematical and abstract modelling of the world, dear to Escher or Vasarely. _(excerpt of text by Maxence Grugier)
Artists: Joanie Lemercier
Location: LMS Gallery, Avenue Louise 335, Brussels, Belgium
Dates: Nov 2016 – Jan 2017
Numen / For Use, LAb[au]
« Bright Matter » a group show capitalizing on cutting edge technology to manipulate perception, the delusive displays demonstrate how light articulates reality — and how easily we are deceived. Here, tightly knit as ever, light and space engage anew. When one is used as a medium, the other becomes a canvas, and fantastical new domains (real or otherwise) unfold before our eyes.
Artists: LAb[au], Numen / For Use, Joanie Lemercier, Nonotak, and François Wunschel.
Location: Muriel Guépin gallery, 83 Orchard St, NYC & Miami Project 2015, Miami
Dates: Nov 2014 – Jan 2015
STRP Biennale 2015
Producing 3 projects for STRP Biennale 2015 under the theme of Screen / No Screen and curator Angelique Spaninks.
Artworks:
Timée by Guillaume Marmin
Blueprint by Joanie Lemercier
Fated Ascent by Donald Abad
Location: Torenallee 32/8 Eindhoven, Netherlands
Dates: 20-29 March 2015
