Hannaleah Ledwell’s pieces displayed at Galerie du Viaduc seem to continue what she was doing in the last two exhibitions of hers that I have seen (at Popup and Gallery Parfois). But there have also been some significant shifts. Specifically, her palette has altered. It is darker, bluer, more night scene but still in the pastoral vein that she seems to cultivate. The rendering of the bodies is clearer and cartoonishly overlaid to make the gestures more legible while less concrete. The figures are more readable, their distinction from the ground is starker than before. This is also helped by the greater expansion in palette.
One of the more interesting things in the show is the inclusion of what appear to be several small mock-ups for paintings that dot across one back wall. It might have been interesting to integrate this aspect more into the display of the more fully worked-out pieces. It will be interesting to see if she goes full illustrative or strips it back to something else.
Dealing with the spectacle of public sex and sentimentally imagining its fleeting moments through the lengthy process of embroidery, Théo Bignon’s exhibition is a mix of wall and floor works of quite disparate scale. I looked at them for a few minutes before bothering to read the accompanying text. Coming in after viewing Tegan Moore’s Condensations in the adjoining room, they initially viewed as more industrial waste trapped in an air filter. There is more to them than that. The accompanying text strains to cast it all in as much romantic pathos as possible:
Théo Bignon’s works confront the difficulty of visualizing these spaces, these moments. Spaces for public sex and chance encounters are organized around vision — around seeing, glancing, being seen, and being seen to look back. The park, the glade, or the pissoir becomes a cruising ground when it offers protection from vision. The club, often painted black so as to disappear and engulf in low light, also offers cover — as anyone knows who has been in the bar when the lights are turned on at the end of the night. That is why these places are so hard to represent visually; they deflect that scrutiny. Bignon, however, reconstructs from memory these spaces charted through chance glimpses, shrouded reaches, and lingering gazes. Building the image from his recollections of being in the space with others, he represents the places of erotic connection as a material labor of love. In the slow, meticulous, and history-laden medium of embroidery, Bignon carves these spaces back — each line, each form is hard-won, made thread by thread.
The wall works, however, are quite bad. They have the tactility of freezer burn on congealed salmon (if everything visceral and bodily about that image was freeze-dried) as they cycle through a series of images that are as generic and predictable as the text. The use of materials is interesting mostly for how much it muddles them, subjugating them to the production of these clichés. While he has pulled this off much better in other series in the past, in this instance the product views as a nostalgia for capture and as a process operates as the performance of such capture. The results are flaccid (perhaps appropriately); their over-embroidering gives their referential gesture the quality of dead weight.
This group show has the usual bean bags and curtains set-up that the exhibition space tends to employ on full display. It is another installment in the expanding quantity of shows trying to imagine the end of the world. It is done almost entirely by video here with pieces lasting a dozen minutes to more than an hour.
The accompanying text stresses that the works do not rely on the, now quite predictable, strategy of documenting scientific processes and forms of representation, and instead employ something bordering on romanticism.
The feeling is already palpable. In the near future, we'll miss what we've missed: what we've neglected will take shape as the desire to recover what now belongs to the past. The anticipation of this future, or the drive towards it, writes the past into the present, infusing the present with nostalgia. This nostalgia, for both the past and the future, involves projecting a constructed image upon another: an image cultivated from the romantic hope of refinding a bygone era.
Most of the narratives come off as no-budget, quirky, and often twee Black Mirror episodes. Vey Duke & Battersby’s piece “imagine[s] a future in which teenage scientists have discovered how to harvest environmentally friendly energy from emotion — a process optimized through exposure to cuteness.” OK Pederson’s work is a “fictional documentary [where] present-day Nation borders have collapsed into vast privatized housing complexes. Epitomizing advanced capitalism’s financialization and incarceration, the citizens of ‘Condo World’ live in a so-called dream where it’s illegal and punishable to leave.” More starkly, in Marte Aas’ piece a dog roams a world without people and imagines this minimal loss in a detached way, subversively suggesting that “the Anthropocene was a relatively unremarkable phase in the planet’s history.” Zheng Bo’s piece concentrates on the long duration of vegetal life that severely relativizes and diminishes the presence of humanity in natural history.
