MAI-THU PERRET
14 Mar - 18 Apr 2009
MAI-THU PERRET
"THE CRACK-UP"
Praz-Delavallade is pleased to announce the second solo show devoted to Mai-Thu Perret. The Crack-Up will presentnew works in both spaces of the gallery.
The work of Mai-Thu Perret relates to Modernism and to the different forms of embodiment of Utopias. With theproduction of manufactured objects that she often locates within an elaborate fictional scenario, Mai-Thu Perretinvestigates the status of the artwork and its context of production.
Since 1999 Mai-Thu Perret has been writing a story entitled “The Crystal Frontier.” This ongoing story follows a group ofwomen disillusioned with capitalist society and patriarchal convention, who set up an autonomous community in thedesert of New Mexico. This community called “New Ponderosa” is dedicated to the invention of a new, non-alienatedrelation to labor and nature. Mai-Thu Perret related the story of these women in the form of fragments from diaries, letters, or activity schedules written by commune members. In addition to this narrative, she creates objects, which shedescribes as the “hypothetical production” of the commune.
Referring to Sol Lewitt’s phrase “the idea is the machine that makes the art”, Mai-Thu Perret resorts to fiction as agenerative mechanism, “a way of creating a machine to make the art.” With this strategy, she aims to free herself fromthe subjectivity of authorship while questioning the position of the author in the production of artworks.
Perret’s works, in a variety of media, from ceramics and textiles to paintings, sculptures or film, have all in common ahand-made aesthetic and use the formal vocabulary of modernism. References to Russian constructivism, 19th-centuryArts & Crafts Movement, early-20th-century mysticism, Minimalism, and various other modern art movements can befound all over her work. By interweaving historical movement and her own fiction, Mai-Thu Perret questions utopias andhow they could be a context for the production of objects and especially works of art. Within the production of bothutilitarian and decorative objects, she’s interested in the status of artworks. What the artist questions is the additionalvalue, the supplementary aura those objects might have when they are extracted from a utopian context.
Perret’s exhibition at Praz-Delavallade, presents a series of stained carpets hanging on the walls like paintings thatevoke Rorschach’s inkblots and seem to convoke the projections of the spectator. They are also the expression of thefree creativity and fun of children’s play that the women of New Ponderosa look for in their return to nature and craft,which they believe to be repressed in patriarchal society.
Two large-scale, rectilinear sculptures recalling Robert Morris’s famous L-Beams from the 1960s will also be on view.These emblematic works attempted to triangulate the relationship between the sculpture, the exhibition space and thespectator. Perret’s version of these minimalist works are based on a rhomboid rather than a rectangular section, andare upholstered in a geometrically patterned jacquard fabric, thus infusing an element of domesticity and craft intothese otherwise austere, modernist forms.
The 3 spheres in cast concrete are also minimalist forms, but with the introduction of a function. Indeed, they areinspired by balls of exercise used in Pilates or gymnastics.In addition to these works, the exhibition will also include two new text panels written by the artist. One of these textdiscusses repetition and fatigue.
Through the exhibition are many refrences to physical gesture, danse or ritual. But this movement remains missing. Thecarpets are like traces of a performance, the sculptures evoque scenic elements left out and the spheres exerciseinstruments. All the works of this exhibition are like vestiges of an action which happened before.
The title of the exhibition “The Crack-Up,” refers to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book of the same name, which brings togetherapparently unfinished or unconnected fragments, notes for stories, letters to friends, and the eponymous essay, writtenin 1935, where Fitzgerald describes his own state of depletion, both economic and spiritual. For the artist, the Crack-Upalso refers to the rift between artwork and interpretation, or between an object and the narrative it allegedly refers to.
Mai-Thu Perret was born in 1976 in Geneva, Switzerland and currently lives in Geneva and New York. She studied atCambridge University, and at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (2004).In addition to several groupexhibitions Perret’s recent solo exhibitions have included: New Works in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art inNovember 2008, An Evening of the Book and Other Stories at The Kitchen in New York, 2008, The Crystal Frontier atKunsthalle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, 2008; and Maastricht’s Bonnefanten Museum, 2007. In 2006 she was also thesubject of a major solo exhibition at The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, and in 2005 at the Centre d’artcontemporain, Geneva. In 2007 she participated in the Lyon Biennale and in Eurocentric at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami. In 2008 a monography about her work was published by JRP Ringier and moreover she is featured in the lastParkett, Issue 84.
"THE CRACK-UP"
Praz-Delavallade is pleased to announce the second solo show devoted to Mai-Thu Perret. The Crack-Up will presentnew works in both spaces of the gallery.
The work of Mai-Thu Perret relates to Modernism and to the different forms of embodiment of Utopias. With theproduction of manufactured objects that she often locates within an elaborate fictional scenario, Mai-Thu Perretinvestigates the status of the artwork and its context of production.
Since 1999 Mai-Thu Perret has been writing a story entitled “The Crystal Frontier.” This ongoing story follows a group ofwomen disillusioned with capitalist society and patriarchal convention, who set up an autonomous community in thedesert of New Mexico. This community called “New Ponderosa” is dedicated to the invention of a new, non-alienatedrelation to labor and nature. Mai-Thu Perret related the story of these women in the form of fragments from diaries, letters, or activity schedules written by commune members. In addition to this narrative, she creates objects, which shedescribes as the “hypothetical production” of the commune.
Referring to Sol Lewitt’s phrase “the idea is the machine that makes the art”, Mai-Thu Perret resorts to fiction as agenerative mechanism, “a way of creating a machine to make the art.” With this strategy, she aims to free herself fromthe subjectivity of authorship while questioning the position of the author in the production of artworks.
Perret’s works, in a variety of media, from ceramics and textiles to paintings, sculptures or film, have all in common ahand-made aesthetic and use the formal vocabulary of modernism. References to Russian constructivism, 19th-centuryArts & Crafts Movement, early-20th-century mysticism, Minimalism, and various other modern art movements can befound all over her work. By interweaving historical movement and her own fiction, Mai-Thu Perret questions utopias andhow they could be a context for the production of objects and especially works of art. Within the production of bothutilitarian and decorative objects, she’s interested in the status of artworks. What the artist questions is the additionalvalue, the supplementary aura those objects might have when they are extracted from a utopian context.
Perret’s exhibition at Praz-Delavallade, presents a series of stained carpets hanging on the walls like paintings thatevoke Rorschach’s inkblots and seem to convoke the projections of the spectator. They are also the expression of thefree creativity and fun of children’s play that the women of New Ponderosa look for in their return to nature and craft,which they believe to be repressed in patriarchal society.
Two large-scale, rectilinear sculptures recalling Robert Morris’s famous L-Beams from the 1960s will also be on view.These emblematic works attempted to triangulate the relationship between the sculpture, the exhibition space and thespectator. Perret’s version of these minimalist works are based on a rhomboid rather than a rectangular section, andare upholstered in a geometrically patterned jacquard fabric, thus infusing an element of domesticity and craft intothese otherwise austere, modernist forms.
The 3 spheres in cast concrete are also minimalist forms, but with the introduction of a function. Indeed, they areinspired by balls of exercise used in Pilates or gymnastics.In addition to these works, the exhibition will also include two new text panels written by the artist. One of these textdiscusses repetition and fatigue.
Through the exhibition are many refrences to physical gesture, danse or ritual. But this movement remains missing. Thecarpets are like traces of a performance, the sculptures evoque scenic elements left out and the spheres exerciseinstruments. All the works of this exhibition are like vestiges of an action which happened before.
The title of the exhibition “The Crack-Up,” refers to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book of the same name, which brings togetherapparently unfinished or unconnected fragments, notes for stories, letters to friends, and the eponymous essay, writtenin 1935, where Fitzgerald describes his own state of depletion, both economic and spiritual. For the artist, the Crack-Upalso refers to the rift between artwork and interpretation, or between an object and the narrative it allegedly refers to.
Mai-Thu Perret was born in 1976 in Geneva, Switzerland and currently lives in Geneva and New York. She studied atCambridge University, and at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (2004).In addition to several groupexhibitions Perret’s recent solo exhibitions have included: New Works in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art inNovember 2008, An Evening of the Book and Other Stories at The Kitchen in New York, 2008, The Crystal Frontier atKunsthalle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, 2008; and Maastricht’s Bonnefanten Museum, 2007. In 2006 she was also thesubject of a major solo exhibition at The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, and in 2005 at the Centre d’artcontemporain, Geneva. In 2007 she participated in the Lyon Biennale and in Eurocentric at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami. In 2008 a monography about her work was published by JRP Ringier and moreover she is featured in the lastParkett, Issue 84.