The Perfume and the Bottle
Charlotte Moth: Choreography of the image: filmic sketches
September 8–October 8, 2016
Opening: Wednesday, September 7, 6-9pm
Parisian Laundry
3550 St-Antoine West
Montreal, Quebec
Canada, H4C 1A9
www.parisianlaundry.com
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Gabriele Beveridge, Andy Coolquitt, Owen Kydd, Kate Steciw & Anne Hall
The Perfume and the Bottle
The aroma lingered and held onto the inside of the bottle as long as it could. Eventually it would detach—the scent fulfilling its ephemeral fate, while the ornamental glass receptacle endured. The reflective label would trigger that particular scent, as would the shadow cast on the wall when the light would meet the bottle’s profile in the late afternoon. I thought the bottle could retain the aroma in time forever—suspended—even after the evocative misty liquid had long been gone. I thought the glass could make the air it contained permanent, transforming it into something concrete. I kept the bottle and I loathed myself for it. The attachment felt at once childish and matronly, but I could not deny my attraction to the object. I wanted to put it somewhere, to venerate it, to look at that relic of an aroma for a long time.
The Perfume and the Bottle presents a selection of works that are deliberately seductive. The artworks presented borrow from advertising imagery, methods of display, and modes of categorisation, evoking a sense of nostalgia and operating within recognizable visual languages of mass consumerism.
Gabriele Beveridge (London, United Kingdom) collects faded hair salon posters and beauty shop ads. She seeks out doubles, skewing or cropping these found images that are paired with photograms and adorned with artist made frames, hand blown glass elements and crystal balls to explore tropes of eternity, ephemera, beauty, and mystique. Andy Coolquitt (Austin, TX) is a quintessential collector of refuse, consistently repurposing the dirty everyday into display patterns and vitrines. Here, Coolquitt’s vitrines present washed up deodorant sticks, their surfaces, naturally roughened by the passage of time, appear as if cast in stone or marble. These indexes of irredeemable materials are, ironically, now (and forever), re-categorised as art. In Owen Kydd‘s (Los Angeles, CA) durational photographs, objects on display are endlessly looped to a nearly Lynchian effect of perpetual unease and fascination. Kydd’s positioning of the screen as art object also draws equivalence between his media and the things he pictures, between the constancy of photography and the dynamism of video. Kate Steciw (New York, NY) suspends fractured and re-purposed stock imagery in her mobile-esque photographic sculptures. The seemingly random assemblages speak directly to the mass consumption and rapid digestion of images. Steciw halts this process, as she suspends the images in free fall. Moreover, new collaborative work with Anne Hall centers on the cyanotype, creating permanence in these imprints of simple objects. Artwork by Andy Coolquitt, Owen Kydd and Kate Steciw & Anne Hall is exhibited courtesy of Lisa Cooley, Monte Clark Gallery and Higher Pictures respectively.
Charlotte Moth
Choreography of the image: filmic sketches
Parisian Laundry is thrilled to present Charlotte Moth‘s Choreography of the Image: Filmic Sketches for the first time in Montreal. The film was initially produced as part of an invitational exhibition with the Tate Archive where the artist investigated the museum’s collection of works by and documentation related to the modernist Barbara Hepworth. Filmic Sketches hauntingly chronicles places significant to Hepworth such as her private studio in St. Ives, the Palais de danse and Cornwall’s coastline.
The work situates each frame as a sketch or experiment, initiating continuity between sculptural objects, space itself, the camera lens and the eyes of the viewer. Furthermore, Filmic Sketches layers varying temporalities in its excavation of history. Nevertheless, historical narratives remain ambiguous and forego the illusion of time as neatly ordered. Rather, time is accounted for through other strategies such as the pace of the camera and formal aesthetics of nostalgia and absence.
Charlotte Moth is a British artist currently working in Paris, France. She has exhibited internationally including at institutions such as at the Tate Britain (London, United Kingdom) and the Esker Foundation (Calgary, AB). Parisian Laundry presents Choreography of the Image: Filmic Sketches courtesy of Marcelle Alix (Paris, France).
