The English term "Fantasy", which means both fantasy and the fantastic, serves as a guide to the exhibition
What Ever Happened to Your Dreams ? From November 24 to January 19, at the
Galerie les Filles du Calvaire, Paris.
Erotical object and advetising privileged target, the child is often represented in contemporary art including photography and video. Adults (author or spectators of the image) have a tender and terrible glance to his World: sometimes seen as a double or a radical self, a mysterious being sometime hostile and cruel, nevertheless fragile and vulnerable, the child lives in a perfect or fantasy world where adults are projecting their fantasies.
The childlike universe, lures associated with an idyllic, fantastic or nightmarish virtuality, ideally takes shape in a fairy tale aesthetic. It is often referred to as a kind of lost Eden where fears and dangers, monsters and evil are hiding behind a prettiness display. It is that phantasmagoria that can be found in popular images.
In the latter, contemporary artists are allusively contributing while building on psychoanalysis and the contribution both cultural and technical of the photographic and film medium. If the works refer frequently and ambivalentely to the joys and anxieties related to the impulses of childhood - a time when dream / nightmare and reality are blending - affirmed staging, apparent or exaggerated digital manipulation are emerging as forms of symbolic resistance to the projections of desires and fears from adults and the roles they wish these childish figures will play.
The title of the exhibition at Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire: "What ever happened to your dreams?" is a direct reference to the 1960's Henry Farrell book adapted for the movies by Robert Aldrich in 1962, "
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" It introduces the concepts of fantasy and duality between romance and terror, between purity and evil, embodied in the film by an aging Bette Davis locked in her child's wishes and lust for eternal youth, struggling with the perversity of Joan Crawford. This exhibition will put the emphasis on pieces illustrating the loss and the overwhelming desire for adults to preserve their dreams.
Fantasy - What Ever Happened to Your Dreams ?from 24-11-2007 to 12-01-2008
Elke Boon, Maïder Fortuné, Julia Fullerton-Batten, Ellen Kooi, Mireille Loup,
Marie-France et Patricia Martin, Wendy McMurdo, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Santeri Tuori
Galerie Les Filles du CalvaireGalerie les filles du calvaire17, rue des Filles-du-calvaire
75003 Paris
Open from tuesday to saturday from 11:00 AM to 06:30 PM
Legs, feet, bodies, faces, stolen moves on a metro exit, in a building reflection, in a train... We're witnessing a dislocation, a ripping of the reality. A sudden roar burst, a town is appearing: Paris, scarefied with humans, lives, traces... Photographs becomes a game of matters and shapes of many layers. The human being becomes a shape in space, a fulcrum where the eye stops and bounce back. In her work, the abstraction look is dominating, but also a definitive modern approach and a more radical photogrphic aesthetic.
