"Jacklighting"

January 27, 2020

French artist Anne-Charlotte Finel presents Jacklighting at The Chimney for her first solo show in the US. Referring to the nocturnal hunting practice of shining bright lights throughout dark fields in order to momentarily stun animals, Jacklighting proves itself both weird and wonderful. Finel's work, focused on spaces affected by unnatural lighting systems, is composed of four reels. And with each video being manipulated both digitally and physically, the story from viewer to viewer may be rather ambiguous.

In Triste Champignonniste (Sad Mushroom Farmer), 2017, Finel films a mushroom farm in a former underground gypsum quarry—although it may look more like the ground for a nuclear bomb shelter as bursting shapes and foggy landscapes are cast upon a pink velvet backdrop. Only upon closer inspection may one gradually discern the actual rotting of elements played upon the deteriorating pixels of the film for a versatile look on decomposition.

As is the case with all of the show’s remaining components, nothing is quite as it seems in Jacklighting. The rhythm of the subjects and the landscapes of the environment speak to the title’s permanent state through the relationship between man and nature, attesting to Finel’s expertise in observing the unordinary and inclination to search for truth in the otherwise vastly unseen.

Text by Caroline Brown
Photos courtesy of The Chimney and the artist; Photography by Reggie Shiobara

Jacklighting is on view at The Chimney until February 23, 2020.

Art

Predicament Escape in Paris

‘Predicament escape’, a term usually associated with magic escapology, involves aspects of the damsel in distress archetype when performed by a female artist, with the difference being that the damsel takes charge of her own fate as opposed to waiting for a hero to come to her aid. Beaudemont places her name among other powerful female figures who, despite the limitations bestowed upon them because of their gender, not only escaped but transended their predicaments to cement their spots in the annalls of history.

Pauline dreams Eileen Gray dreams Beatriz Colomina dreams Pauline dreams Mary McLeod dreams Charlotte Perriand dreams.

Creating an enclosed space evocative of a prison, the artist challenges and subverts this female archetype paradoxically through her embracement of the archetype itself, a bold reclamation that lends this piece it’s rhetorical potency.

Currently, we are wishing we could escape the bleak predicament that is America to catch this show. Do us a favor and go instead. Head back to our office interview with the artist to hear more about her fantasy life in the 1800s, what gets her out of bed, and much, much more.

Text by Kennedy Fairfax

Portrait by Edgars Gluhovs

Still life photos by Aurélien Mole

Art

(Rat) Apocalypse Now

Peter Paquin has a term he likes to use. He’s not sure where it's from or if he made it up. “Misanthropologist” combines two terms: misanthrope meaning “hater of mankind” and anthropologist. What Paquin wants the viewers of his first solo show to know is that he doesn't actually hate humankind— It's just that he's painfully aware of human ignorance. To Paquin, the show and its message is ”more about humans being their own worst enemy.“

So if it's about humans, why rats? Paquin has been using rats as an icon for decades since he first began tagging them in the late 90’s. What Verman shows us, other than Paquin's popularity in the art world, is the ability for iconography to hold many layers of meaning: "what it boils down to is having a subject that I can use as an image and just do variations on. And the image also loses meaning if that makes sense. But while also having this incredibly heavy meaning, in the opposite regard, it becomes extremely abstract.”

While it may not be a premonition exactly, Verman points out the ironic ways humans degrade ourselves. We try so hard not to see the waste that we create and the vermin that live on that waste. But like many other things in life, it's the things that we try so desperately to make invisible that becomes so detrimental to us because of the ways we allow them to mutate and fester without accountability. Ironically, it's exactly this aggressive neglect of the filth that we have created that makes it so potently fatal. By forcing us to look at this and experience “the rat” as we have made him, Peter Paquin may have a hand in stopping this vicious cycle, but I suppose it's up to us in the end.

Verman by Peter Paquin is currently on view at Procell, 5 Delancey St, NY, NY.

Art

Beyond the Broken Screen

These pieces are as much about what isn’t there as they are about what is: the hollow shapes that lurk beneath the surface resemble things plain, industrial, rectangular—the width ergonomically suited to a handheld device, the length suggesting something to be wielded, a weapon, a torch, something to light the way out of darkness or incite a rampant blaze. Perhaps it is that very blaze that melted these screens, who, frozen in the throes of death, evoke the twisted struggle of mere physical existence.