ART
Annette Messenger |
Written 30 January |
Friday 25 September, 11:00Marian Goodman Gallery, 75003 [map]Annette Messenger
Annette Messenger speaking of A Corps perdu : « I started to think about this piece well before I created it. Various retrospectives I did made me want to work from photography left over from 1998. I use negatives that I produced a long time ago, never used : baby photos, adults, old people. The children have grown up, I’ve lost contact with a lot of them, former students, people who have disappeared… however all these fragments of bodies, faces, this recomposed multiplicity constitutes a memory, they are my portrait today…. I would like to give them a breath, a life but all are covered with a black veil – “the presence of absence” (
Roland Barthes).”
On the ground level, Et range ta chambre 2007-2009, is an installation composed of numerous elements. On two walls, black thin cords are suspended from which badges are pinned from original designs by the artist. Diverse objects have been added: architecture, people, tree in imitation leather, all created between 2007-2009.
« For two years, in the day and evening, in bedrooms, everywhere, on little round bits of paper I drew, wrote words, placed photographs, designed, then fed them into a badge making machine. I left them on the floor for a while, more than a thousand badges in a huge joyful mess.. I have always liked pins, badges that travel pinned to our clothes, our bags, our bodies: affirmation of self, differentiation, social and political claims. Now the majority of my badges are fixed on black ropes installed on the wall fixed on tissue bundles, or diverse objects or in waiting in my cardboard boxes. At the same time, other elements of black imitation leather have been added to these badges: ageless objects, serving nothing, suspended or left on the ground, small cars, beds, toy furniture, and bust puppets from badly tidied rooms…” Messenger has just exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in London. “The Messenger” started off at the Pompidou Centre before touring globally.
