Artist: Daniel Jacoby
Exhibition title: Making Waves
Venue: Antoine Levi, Paris, France
Date: January 29 – March 11, 2016
Photography: Claire Dorn, images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Antoine Levi, Paris
To evert a sphere is to turn it inside-out by means of a continuous deformation, which allows the surface to pass through itself, but forbids puncturing, ripping, creasing, or pinching the surface. An abstract theorem proved in the late 1950s implied that sphere eversions were possible, but due to the number of self-intersecting surfaces in the process, it remained a challenge for many years to visually exhibit an explicit eversion.
Antoine Levi gallery is pleased to present Daniel Jacoby’s second solo show in Paris , titled “Making Waves”. The exhibition is composed of three artworks conceived by the artist after a journey through Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, during the shooting of his short film Jagata (2016).
Eversion is a curtain which longitudinally traverses the gallery space and, thanks to an electronic system, is repeatedly picked up from the ground and later released, mimicking the so-called “kabuki drop”, often used in theatre, as well as in car presentations. The fabric of the curtain is embroidered with one of the first flat representation of a sphere eversion.
All around the gallery, are five small photographs of bread toasts. As a sort of morning ritual, the artist used the scarce amount of cheese he could find in Japan – mostly just processed cheese – to abstractly depict the faces of the five people that guided him through his journey. These bread loaf portraits are respectively titled as the person’s first name: Chiaki, Emi, Isozaki, Kiri, Shoko.
Discretely from the bottom of one of the columns, we can hear the sound piece Biwas. A somewhat robotic voice endlessly loops through a short story that refers to a misunderstanding with some plum-like fruits found one night near Sapporo.
Daniel Jacoby (b. 1985, Lima) graduated in fine arts from the University of Barcelona and furthered his education at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where he studied under Prof. Simon Starling. Driven by an interest for the uncanny, he embarks in journeys to unfamiliar places, in which, through the use of abstract film and video narratives, his personal recordings are rendered otherworldly. His cinematic practice is often complemented with site-specific installations, performances, or publications.
Recent exhibitions include venues such as The Banff Centre, Alberta; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg; Plataforma Revolver, Lisbon; SESC Videobrasil, São Paulo; 1646, The Hague (solo); Trafó, Budapest; S1 Artspace, Shef field; the 11th Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador; Maisterravalbuena Galería, Madrid (solo); Sabot, Cluj; Jeanine Hofland, Amsterdam. He is currently in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, where he is developing forthcoming projects for Open Studios 2016, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht; and All the beast, an online exhibition cur. by Nerina Ciaccia, Antoine Levi and Fabio Santacroce
