COLLECTION n°4 at Interior and The Collectors

Artists: Wang Du, Shaun Gladwell, Fabien Villon, Anne de Vries

Exhibition title: COLLECTION n°4

Venue: Interior and The Collectors, Lyon, France

Date: September 10, 2015 – January 2, 2016

Photography: Christel Montury, images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Interior and The Collectors

Interior and The Collectors is an artist-run space founded in 2011 in Lyon. It takes place in an apartment and recently in a XIXth house, both opened to the public each saturday 2-4pm.
The two spaces are available for short-term renting to make an intimate experience of art.

COLLECTION n°4 with Wang Du, Shaun Gladwell, Fabien Villon, Anne de Vries

Artists Wang Du, Shaun Gladwell, Fabien Villon and Anne de Vries use domestical space as a way to experiment the borders between art and object, materiality and virtuality, nature and technology. With Paul Virilio as a father figure, site specific installation, collective and individual artworks, objects, writings, artefacts are intermigled into a private apartment.

Being in tune with today’s world, it’s finally traveling from home, using its own tablet computer or mobile to navigate. Species of space, the apartment is reassuring, it becomes a reflection airlock in which the visitor can read, touch, use, wear the works or contemplate it as landscapes. All have in common an idea of disorientation: Wang Du’s silk bathrobes made from news images or advertising, Shaun Gladwell’s video in which his body is submerged into the pacific waves, Anne de Vries hybrid work between sculpture, object and interior design, Fabien Villon’s painting made by printing crashed windscreen on the remains of an advertising image or the common work by Shaun Gladwell and Fabien Villon in connexion with Paul Virilio, setting a library available to the visitor.

« If Derrida has invented the concept of deconstruction, I have experimented disorientation » (Paul Virilio).

The work of Gregor Hildebrandt In der wohnung liegt das glückde has been preserved since his last solo show in 2013. This is a site specific installation on the ceilings made with cent coins glued to the knots of the wood. This work was inspired by a german proverb that promises luck to whoever finds coins over the floor. Space is highlighted in its height and encouraged to be looked at, glittering like a starry night.

Wang Du (born in 1956) presents a serie of silk bathrobes completely covered with printed news images and adverts. These works have never been shown to the public. Placed in different parts of the apartment such as clothes left by a tenant, the visitor is invited to try out and be himself covered with multiple sources of images. The silk transforms this image slurry into a decorative pattern.

Shaun Gladwell (born in 1972) presents two works, the video Pacific undertow sequence (2010) and Loop tribute for Paul (2015), a collaborative work with artist Fabien Villon. In this video, the artist himself is filmed on a board, upside down, his body is completely immersed in the water and battered by the waves of the Pacific Ocean at Bondi beach. The body tensioned like a disjointed puppet in search of an impossible balance. The unique light of the seabed gives a sensation of floating between two waters. The Australian artist is known for his low speed films, using the real-time and often featuring an improvised and mastered performance.

Shaun Gladwell and Fabien Villon have both been influenced by Paul Virilio and they decided to propose a common work (loop tribute to Paul) around this thinker of postmodernity. Shaun Gladwell wrote the book PATAFUNCTIONS with philosophers taking up the graphic design of coverage Semiotexte editions that have published numerous books of Paul Virilio and other major figures. This essay examines the relationship between artwork and object and becomes an artifact in itself. Fabien Villon decided to reconstitute a part of Paul Virilio’s library, presenting the books that have the most influenced his philosophical work. Maintaining a correspondence with the philosopher, he met him and asked to the curator Christel Montury to photograph him holding the book of Shaun Gladwell, drowning his work into a mise en abyme.

Fabien Villon (born in 1981) also showcases a large format made by crossing different types of visual waste. He uses leftover advertising canvas as a support on which he prints crashed windscreens. These landscapes are also a metaphor of the screen as a projection surface that becomes an image from a shock. This work reveals a pictorial language and questions the relationship between crushing and depth, virtuality and materiality.

Anne de Vries (born 1977) presents the sculpture Login for two, 2013. Through the change of scale the sixties ‘hippy’ glasses are removed from its function as bodily appendage and become part of the interior design. This hybrid transformation embodies the perceived dichotomy between the objective world and our own subjective perceiving mind. This sculpture seems to be adapted to the sofa but the visitor can interpreted its function. The artist often maintains a relationship with technology through the prism of philosophy by questioning its aesthetics and the perception that results.

Shaun Gladwell and Fabien Villon, Loop tribute to Paul ( detail), 2015

Wang Du, untitled, silk bathrobes, 2007

Fabien Villon, Orbite, 2015

Shaun Gladwell and Fabien Villon, Loop tribute to Paul, Shaun Gladwell’s essay PATAFUNCTIONS, Photography of Paul Virilio by Christel Montury, book Pure war by Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer 1997 semiotext edition
Fabien Villon, Paul, 2015