Entre chien et loup
2015 - Installation (Installation)
170 x 150 cm
Gaëlle Choisne
Entre Chien et Loup is an installation incorporating a variety of media: rubber, discs, feathers and confetti that the artist weaves, sews and glues together. Influenced by Mike Kelley’s Memory Ware series, the artist creates an object-memory from found materials. The found objects used recall the artist’s mother – it is somehow her portrait, her cape-. Choisne’s mother was born in Haiti and migrated to France with her husband. She landed in Cherbourg, Brittany where she became “the foreigner” by her country of origin and her skin color. The work too is a tribute to the artist Sun Ra, his costumes and the Afrofuturism movement of which he is an emblematic figure. In this work, Choisne presents her mother as a figure of Afrofuturism. The expression Entre Chien et Loup refers to the moment when in dim light, one can no longer distinguish between a dog and a wolf. Here, in references to the figures that populate the installation -the artist’s mother and Sun Ra- they become indistinguishable.
Gaelle Choisne’s artistic practice is an address to the world’s disorder. Without any pessimism or catastrophism, it mirrors the complexity of contemporary times trough multiple medias and burgeoning installations. Sculptures, images and referential systems are imbricatedhere and merge in opulent environments, inhabited by the gestures of the artist. Between occult fables and objective sciences, from the Caribbean to European literary traditions, she navigates through imaginaries as composite as the techniques which give them shape: casting, firing, printout, suspension, collage, torsion, extraction. The artist’sinterest in the work process is often left apparent in installations-sculptures-images whose fringes are always experimental. As if, lost in apermanent gestation, her work could not obtain a permanent status in regard to its arrangement, form and reproducibility. Thus, itspertinence is to be found in this discontinuous transformation, this systematic reversing of media, techniques and surfaces. This practice of becoming, in which meaning can arise only through perpetual movement, operates through palpation and seems always agitated,marked by an organic energy. One could say that the hand, which always fiddles, displaces and modifies plays a kind of drag, a falselynaïve craftsmanship. (Text by Thomas Conchou)
