Laurene Gitton
email : laurene.gitton@gmail.com
website : http://gitton.org/
EDUCATION
BA Fine Art, Critical Studies and studio Practice
Goldsmiths College, London (UK)
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS AND PROJECTS, RESIDENCE CAREER
2018 "Veuillez décliner mon identité" by Florent Matéo, set design, Paris (France)
2018 Mozilla Festival, London (UK)
2018 Atelier Médicis residency with Gaétan Barbé, Clichy-sous-bois, (France)
2016 Salem Art Works residency, Salem (USA)
"Anonymous Avatars", 6 months residency with the support of Ateliers Médicis, Clichy-sous-bois and Montfermeil (2018)
In collaboration with Gaetan Barbé, we launched new works during a residency at the Ateliers Médicis, based on deconstructing languages, social structures, genders performance with young teenagers, we kicked off group discussions based on different texts.
We called ourselves Anonymous Avatars, as a reference to the different representations one’s have of her/himself on social medias. We took over a former control room in a the Espace 93, and used it as a safe to unravel words painted on all the surfaces of the black room. As the conversations developed, we translated our thoughts into many intuitive diagrams that each participant could be a part of. By systematically explaining our thoughts and feelings like this, we managed to extract what was so political about them. We organised several workshops over 10 months including discussions, picnics, poster campaign and shooting of a video clip.
Salem Art Works, mixed medias - Salem, USA (2016)
Untitled, news paper and cotton thread (2009)
Text by Stéphane Bottéro, curator at Zone Sensible, Saint-Denis, France
Laurène Gitton's work deals with the representation of destruction and loss. Working across a wide range of material references and elements from visual culture, she adresses the elusive relationships between violence and the contemporary gaze. In her sculptures and installations, destructive gestures become generative of the artistic process. Fictive protheses, slashed photographs, manipulated texts question the viewer: broken artefacts or failed reparations? The immanent violence embedded in the works draws the viewer's attention to peripheral parameters: the way an image is framed, what surrounds a suppressed object, details usually overlooked. Georges Bataille placed on a same plane desire and loss, calling for a poetics of non-knowing. The disturbing feeling of absence encountered in Laurène Gitton's work suggests that void might have something to teach. In her sculptural book “Untitled”, press portraits collected over a period of several months are systematically concatenated, the subject physically cut out from each page. In order to reconstruct the reality they refer to, the viewer's gaze turns to secondary semantics: colors, clothes, backgrounds. The book is made in such a way that turning the page distractedly would destroy it. It operates as a double critique of contemporary media: violence captures attention, but we are reminded of the fragility of this état d'esprit. After all, just as matter followsdialectis of accumulation and organization of entropy, an artwork projects a particular state of mind on an inevitably transitional state of things.
