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Curator's Statement
Introduction
Last and Universal: the Semantics of Judgment
Thought Through Images
Seduced by Freedom of Thought
Art in the Age of Short-Term Memory
A Call to Artists and Audience
Seventeen Modern Tales
Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Seventeen Modern Tales, pt. 6
The
idea of a personal Last Judgment recurs more or less explicitly in the
works of several artists. In De La Vraisemblance, Autour Du Personnage
De Pierre Mouchon (On Plausibility, Around The Figure Of Pierre Mouchon),
Jean-Jacques
Ringuette creates a poetic paraphrase of the human condition.
Through photographic portraits of Pierre Mouchon, a plush pig puppet,
the artist raises the question of what happens when the phantoms manipulating
our destiny are hidden from us, or inside us. In a game of displacing
body (Pierre Mouchon, puppet and person ) and soul (who plays with and
victimizes Pierre Mouchon), (see De l'âme de Pierre Mouchon (About
the soul of Pierre Mouchon)), Ringuette questions the assumption that
the modern self is in control, and evokes the ghosts of the unconscious
to represent our everyday last self-judgments.
With Lucky, Friese
Undine displays a gallery of private quotidian last judgments,
with no rational explanation to account for a chain of casualties and
coincidences. This mural-size installation contains fifty paintings of
people who are displaying intense emotion -- clutching their heads in
shock, despair or exhaustion. “Lucky permits an audience
to wallow in my belief that our lives are not our own, that our fates
are determined by events outside of our control.” The emotional
impact of Lucky is embedded in the intrinsic universalism of
the gestures and the emotions expressed by those gestures. Through the
anonymity of the portraits, Lucky speaks of everyone’s
vulnerability, while poetically embracing both viewer and nameless people
on the canvas in the thought that this could happen to any one of us..
