Film & Video (Film & Video)

The short video Inside the Studio by Neïl Beloufa follows a humorous Toy Story -esque conversation between the artworks inside the artist’s studio. In the personless space, two animated paintings express their hopes for their future, contemplating the beverage options at the exhibition opening at which they intend to be presented, while a third painting forgoes such superficial conversation to consider their significance and purpose in the context of the art institution and the public’s perception. Interrupting their conversation, the artworks become the backdrop for an in-studio interview with the artist and a film crew.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eric Dizambourg’s film presents a bucolic and ludicrous world used as a background for a character who is an actor as well as a performer. This character comes and goes throughout the countryside, the barn and an urban setting, a world of odds and ends where objects often seem to be used for other purposes than their original ones.

Installation (Installation)

In this installation, you are standing at the heart of a bicephalous space reflecting Goldin+Senneby’s main research led during their residency in Paris. Here, two historical events from the late 1930’s and early 50’s are confronted. In one of these spaces, you find yourself reading a map of the Marly forest where Georges Bataille’s secret society, « Acéphale », was meeting around 1937 and notably celebrating Louis XVI’s regicide.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Titled afterTruman Capote’s protagonist famously played by Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Holly Golightly (2011) captures the essence of the character: seductive and bold, mysterious and capricious. Though tied to the ceiling by a chain, the suggested figure is literally light on her feet, with a pointed boot hovering just above the gallery floor. Non-parallel lines and inconsistent angles lend the sculpture a sense of airy haphazardness.

Painting (Painting)

It may take a minute to recognize the background of New Fall Lineup – the colors are tweaked into a world of cartoon and candy, and it is covered by leaping energetic figures and flying squirrels. One realizes, though, that the image is of the World Trade Center exploding into flame, creating a strange contrast with the painting’s colors and the other images. The combination is peculiar because the role the explosion serves here is non-specific.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Jason Meadows’s Do Not Pass Go (2011) depicts Richie Rich, “the poor little rich boy” of the 1950s comic strip. As his steel outline gleefully makes off with a bag of money and a stack of bills, another icon of affluent America, Uncle Pennybags (otherwise known as the Monopoly Man), is crushed underfoot between two heavy blocks. Behind them lies a broken piggy bank, depicted upside down with eyes X-ed out.

Photography (Photography)

Diversionist is part of the Cosplayers Series from 2004. In Cosplayers Cao Fei depicts the popularity among Asian youths of “cosplay” in which daily life is merged with images of video games and popular films. For many, this virtual reality is an outlet to “transcend” the paradox of a developing society in which the pleasures of consumption and depression of alienation go hand-in-hand.