I Prefer Paris

Paris Artseen: Julie LeGrand

Photo by Antonio Meza

The questions regarding our environment dominate magazine covers, fill pages of newspapers, inspire political and personal debates, even find their way into literature and art.  Yet the work of young French plasticienne Julie LeGrand goes far beyond a treatment of environmental issues, challenging notions of nature vs. manmade (or artificial) production, asking “which is menaced, which menacing?”. 

In her series of tactile pieces entitled “Rose” (I, II, III), one might merely see hills of bright fibers that make the viewer want to plunge their fingers in, dive into the pile as they might surround themselves in the cushy warmth of a scarf, or brush their cheek up against them as they might a fern in a botanical garden. For Legrand, however, this series is part of an homage to a lost ancestor. As such, she is less concerned by the material that is amassed than by how it comes together and connects, how it makes a solid shape and yet, as in the image of Rose III pictured left/right displayed in the Château de Saint Ouen’s expo “Tendre”(2007), where we see parts of it dangling over the top of the stairwell, it is at once coming together and thinning out, disappearing, falling away from the ensemble. The solidity of the mass, at first mountainous, dwindles, as in nature mortality covers over, erases and replaces. 

Conversely, an accumulation of threads becomes almost menacing in her humorous piece “Les liens coupés” displayed in winter 2007 at La Maison Rouge, Paris 12e http://www.lamaisonrouge.org/fr/index.php. Atop a bed, smashing it, a body of yarn-like material is a planet, green nature crushing the bed (a human structure) under its massive weight and size.  The title again evokes humanity, and separation between humans. It throws the piece’s interpretations in many directions, eliciting at once the idea of a collection of links cut from others, a couple’s splitting up, an individual separated from the world, the world or planet personified as off brooding in its room (perhaps because we have so mistreated it), the way separation grows making it difficult to reconnect later, or simply the massive collection of things in life, necessary or not, that overtake us at times in funny, ludicrous ways, as a ball of string does in this case.

Other works by LeGrand evoke more directly nature taking over the space of a gallery, such as “retour aux sources” and “sans titre” which seem to be sending silicone root systems out over the space of the expo, or nature vanishing, such as “Tralalarme” a transparent series of pyrex and crystal glass drops pasted one by one onto the wall at the Galerie Anton Weller, Paris 6e, in 2006 for her exhibition “Faire et Defaire”.  In “Tralalarme”, the droplets form a vine trickling up and down the wall, enclosing it as if in a natural substance but entirely manufactured (and unfortunately for viewers, as hard to photograph as it was stunning).  LeGrand, originally a country girl, says that she came to Paris and now she often confronts ideas of nature interacting with architectural space, “such as mold overtaking a ceiling, or vines covering over a building”.  This time, though, the transparent substance seemed more at risk of vanishing than invading; on the verge of evaporating unnoticed even as it overtakes the wall. 

In her sculptural projects, LeGrand desires, as she has said “to explore the manufactured” but also to locate it in a way that “is beautiful and fascinating, which shines and draws your attention to it”. Her influences are as varied as American minimalism, Jerôme Bosch and Cy Twombly. She enjoys working in Paris, a major urban space, and seems to see herself now as an urban artist, fascinated by the found, what one discovers in the city. As such, LeGrand’s work recognizes interconnection between self and other, discovered thus uncovered potential.  It is an extension of her main thematic explorations: nature and artificial, creation and exploration, color and the absence thereof, the fragility of both the natural and the created/fabricated object. Only now in her mid-thirties and with an increasingly inspiring body of work developing, she is a French artist to keep your eye on, and certainly to see when traveling here in France!

 

Julie Legrand’s work is currently being shown at Fondation Ecureuil, Toulouse. http://www.caisseepargne-art-contemporain.fr/
Galerie Anton Weller, Paris, represents LeGrand’s work:
http://www.antonweller.com/artistes/legrand/legrand_en.htm and where you may find a downloadable pdf of her “dossier artistique” which includes a collection of images of the works described above.

Jennifer K Dick is an author (of Fluorescence, Retina, & Enclosures) and teacher (currently at EHESS and Ecole Polytechnique). She co-organizes the bilingual IVY reading series with Michelle Noteboom in Paris which began in a gallery thanks to curator Susie Hollands. Jennifer is now completing her PhD at Paris III on visual uses of the page in poetry: text and image in works by Anne marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim and Susan Howe.
http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com

Eye Prefer Paris Contest -Extended till next Thursday

One of my goals for 2009 is to at least double my subscriptions and I am enlisting you to help me achieve that. Many of you have turned your friends, families, and colleagues on to EPP but now I'm looking to up the ante. So I decided to have a contest to see who will register to most new subscribers. The prize? A copy of the wonderful book We've Always had Paris and Provence, the fascinating and highly entertaining story of Patricia & Walter Wells life here. It also includes some of Patricia's classic recipes.

The best way to go about subscribing people is to go to my homepage www.eyepreferparis.com and on the right hand sidebar you will see a box where it says enter email address. Enter each email separately. A confirmation message will appear that says "Please check your inbox for a verification message from FeedBurner’s “[email protected],” the service address that delivers email subscriptions for I Prefer Paris. You will need to click a link listed in this message to activate your subscription." Please cut and paste that and send it to the person you subscribed so they can confirm their subscription. Please email me at [email protected] to let me know how many people you have subscribed.

I will announce the winner next Thursday, so start subscribing now.

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about such as small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.
Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com

Paris Artseen- Seulgi Lee

The lines between visual and performance arts has been growing blurrier these past years, especially when one examines cutting edge explorations such as those by Seulgi Lee, a South Korean artist living in Paris for the past 17 years.  After completing her degree at an arts high school in Seoul, Lee came to France to study at the Beaux Arts in Paris. An admirer of Rodin and Claudel, as well as work by Renoir, Lee began her studies at the Beaux Arts in a mosaic studio.  For Lee, deciding to participate in this workshop was part of a realization that one could use decorative arts techniques in fine arts work.  Thus began a series of transformations towards her own interdisciplinary artistic practice.  In her third year at the Beaux Arts, Lee met Jean-Luc Vilmouth who'd just begun teaching in the sculpture studio.  "I showed him pictures of garbage cans and other things, things I wasn't willing to show anyone else, and he made me realize art could be made out of nothing or anything."  Most of the students in Vilmouth's group—which Lee became a part of—were doing installation and mixed performance pieces at the time, a direction Lee's work would take.

Given these foundations, one sees how the work Lee has been showing over the past decade here in Paris and in Seoul borrows from the decorative arts in its bright colourings and textures; it is playful, almost giddy at times. For example, a 2005 exhibition at Miss China Beauty Room in Paris showed a sock tree called "weeping willow" alongside a series of almost naïve drawings of single objects floating mid-page.  Her installation piece "c" from a show at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2001 recalls something from fairy tales or a children's stage set: out of the edge of a giant grey lump stick live people's legs (see image).  In fact, Lee believes that "children are the most serious of people," and therefore she tries to get at the elements of childhood which unite all of us. "Everyone was a child once, its something we all share," she explains, and I want to "create relationships with [and between] people"— as well as between objects.  This is why she works with what she calls "standard forms" such as blocks and circles, or everyday objects, such as green tea, doors, doorknobs or take out cups.

One should not be fooled, however, by the surface lightness of this work.  It exposes its own interrogations of serious issues within playful, unthreatening (or less threatening) space.  Take for example the take-out cup and straw in her 2008 solo show "Automatic; homage to the thief" at Colletpark galérie, Paris. This cup's an object, Lee explains, we just toss away.  Yet in her work she connects the cup and a plastic fast food tray via a straw within which water is then circulated "permanently".  This, Lee adds, is opposed to the disposable logic of the object, giving it elements of sustainability, making the material take on a constancy unlike our daily uses for it.  Similarly, for the show "B side" from the Do Art Gallery in Seoul, Lee's "Green Tea" piece linked two solid green cubes with a bar of running green tea.  Instead of constructing a real bar between the cubes, she used the flow of liquid.  The tea is at the same time more constant and yet also not fabricated like an object, nor solid in the same manner as a bar would have been.  As here, Lee is "interested in creating objects where the relationship between them is indirect".  The stream of tea also adds mobility to the work, like a life force connecting the cubes.


When asked whether she thinks about impermanence, or what is left behind (speaking both of people and objects), in relationship to her own migration to Paris, or how people confront others' leaving, deal with absence, distance or loss, Lee looks stumped and admits that she had not conceived of her work this way.  However, she admits, she has moved a lot in her life, even in Paris, and her work does deal with that search for the familiar, or a desire to see the world from another perspective. For example, she sought out difficult to locate round doorknobs for her piece "Porte américaine" (see image) —whereas in France, the doorknobs are typically horizontal levers, the round knob, prevalent in the USA, is also the kind she recalls from her childhood in Korea. This piece is a door with 7 doorknobs, but, as she said, "only one will actually open the door, though many are offered.  It's the idea that we're given a lot of options but only one works, like in life."

Lee's work is also quite political—despite its bright and cheerful camouflage. In fact, the political aspects of her artwork have lead Lee to put herself in positions of risk, such as for her documented performance piece "Une afghane en Corse".  This piece emerged after Lee saw images of women in Burkas in a metro ad at a time when she was noticing an increasing number of covered women around Paris, and was interested in black hooded protesters in Corsica.  In the interest of bringing these intersecting ideas of people covering themselves up or being covered, Lee dressed in bright floral patterns—a small flower motif she later learned is called "liberty"— and hooded herself in a similarly floral scarf in which only two eye holes were cut.  Lee then wandered around the island of Corsica, an island covered with tiny, richly perfumed Mediterranean wildflowers. No one would mistake this getup for traditional covering, yet it angered some of the people she came across and even frightened a few. "For me, taking risks in the real world is very important", Lee explained, which is why she sought out actual protesters to display another political work, the giant yellow banner on which Lee embroidered the word "STRIKE" in French: "GRÈVE" in pink thread.  The process of meticulous, time-consuming embroidery was, for Lee, also a response to the idea of striking.  For some strikers protest to avoid unemployment, which puts one into a position of having too much time on one's hands, and in striking one is also not at work. This piece also touched on an element of the feminist idea of women's work not having value yet being time consuming.  Though Lee never managed to get this French banner used in a real demonstration in France, she did manage to have a Korean version in held high at a May 1st parade in Seoul.

Whether you enjoy Lee's work because it helps you, as she hopes to, "see the world with the eyes of objects" or "see objects are inhabitants of the earth just as human beings are" or you simply laugh at the vibrancy of some childhood echo, this work certainly does reawaken the hidden corner of ourselves where the curious child still resides, strangely evoking the future adult with all of its complicated politics. 

Currently, Seulgi Lee's work is represented by La Galerie Colletpark in Paris and she will be showing alongside Caroline Molusson at la Ferme du Buisson Centre d'Art in Noisiel near Marne-la-Vallée (out on RER A from Paris) from January 24 thru March 29th, 2009. 
http://www.lafermedubuisson.com/caroline-molusson-seulgi-lee.html
 
Jennifer K Dick is an author (of Fluorescence, Retina, & Enclosures) and teacher (currently at EHESS and Ecole Polytechnique). She co-organizes the bilingual IVY reading series with Michelle Noteboom in Paris which began in a gallery thanks to curator Susie Hollands. Jennifer is now completing her PhD at Paris III on visual uses of the page in poetry: text and image in works by Anne marie Albiach, Myung Mi Kim and Susan Howe.
http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com

I am pleased as punch to announce the launch of Eye Prefer Paris Tours, which are 3-hour walking tours I will personally be leading. The Eye Prefer Paris Tour includes many of the places I have written about including small museums & galleries, restaurants, cafes & food markets, secret addresses, fashion & home boutiques, parks, and much more.

I look forward to meeting you on my tours and it will be my pleasure and delight to show you my insiders Paris.
Check it out at www.eyepreferparistours.com