1301PE presents Fade to Black, its third exhibition with artist Philippe Parreno, from 23 March until 27 April 2013.
The ghosts of Parreno's past projects come back to haunt this new series of glow-in-the-dark posters that depict previously aborted works. The posters must be exposed to light before the imprints become visible in the dark, gradually fading away only to reappear when re-exposed to light. The posters show quasi-objects - forms that do not exist on their own but depend upon the conditions of the exhibition to appear.
The images bring to the surface of the conscious mind precisely the things that it could not tolerate. Their slight radioactive decay energizes the phosphor, emitting a glow. The imprints of never realized works, failures and unfulfilled desires, were left behind in excess. They cannot be truly qualified as artworks as they were originally rejected. They are the heterogeneous; the pushed back; the soiled; the abject; the gutter; the filthy; the snot; the scum; the excremental; the stercoraceous; the dross; the ragged; the eliminated; the pulverized; the ruined; the fermented; the spoiled, the decomposed; the negligible; the slag; the scoria; the putrescible; the rotting; the turd; the dejection; the evacuation; the sewer; the discharge; the release…
Rising to prominence in the 1990s, Parreno has earned critical acclaim for his work, which employs a diversity of media including film, sculpture, performance, drawing and text. He has radically redefined the exhibition experience by conceiving his shows as a scripted space where a series of events unfolds.
Parreno used this format for the recent exhibition, Dancing around the Bride at the Philadelphia Museum of Art which is currently on show as The Bride and The Bachelors at the Barbican, London. For this show he has acted as metteur-en-scène (orchestrator), using temporal and spatial sequencing to activate the artworks of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Marcel Duchamp.
At his current solo show at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Parreno presents Marilyn (2012), which premiered last summer at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel. For this film he conjured up Marilyn Monroe through a phantasmagoric séance in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, where she lived in the 1950s. The film reproduces Marilyn Monroe's presence by means of three algorithms: the camera becomes her eyes, a computer reconstructs the rhythms of her voice, and a robot recreates her handwriting.
Philippe Parreno lives and works in Paris, France. He has shown in a series of major solo exhibitions at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia; Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland; Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; Hessel Museum, CCS Bard College, Annandale-on- Hudson, NY; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; and Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
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Earlier Event: January 19
FIONA CONNOR: BARE USE
Later Event: May 4
KIRSTEN EVERBERG