Hail to the New Flesh

20.05.17 - 17.06.17

Solo show by Laura Gozlan

Opening Saturday 20th May from 6.30-8pm

First of all entering into Laura Gozlan’s exhibition, ‘Hail to The New Flesh’, is to penetrate it. It is making the choice to go down the steps and into the darkness, to find oneself deprived of the natural light of the world. It is at this precise moment that the space becomes fictional, and its content are strangely uncertain. Where all is hypothesis: the place in its forms is unknown, its outlines and different alcoves in artificial lights make it barely perceptible.

Then, step by step as if in anticipation, the exhibition reveals itself. Where the works seem to come from a parallel world where technology blends with the organic to become one: sounds, almost imperceptible whispers, emanate from the entrails of Breathing Skins (2017), screens trapped in thoracic cages whose bones have mutated into shapeless matter. Similarly, the Inner chains (2017) and translucent guts containing organs of fish, octopi and computer cables, fragmented vascular systems of bodies from which it is difficult to apprehend their whole. Out of our time, these emaciated beings evolve in a constant transformation, in a perpetual change of state. The wax of the nose of Sensorium (2017), or the mud and clay of which Mold IV (2017) speaks, are once again elements chosen by the artist for their plastic qualities: modulable and terribly humanoid, they take form before returning to the shapeless. Entering the exhibition is to reach the flesh of the crypt, into its entrails. Within, the Physical Self(2017) installation becomes in its turn epidermic. Crossed by plates of plexiglass, transparent membranes, the images projected onto the walls of the crypt revealing their substances: ranging from digital images taken from video games, 3D modeling of the face of the artist, extracts from Japanese cartoons (Perfect blue, 1997, Satoshi Kon) or films with monstrous characters (The Beyond, 1981, Lucio Fluci), each fragment encourages a different introspection by questioning various notions of identity and interiority both, physical and psychic. ‘Hail to The New Flesh’, an anticipatory fantasy of a parallel space, in the belly of a crypt.

Laura Gozlan’s artistic practice revolves around experimental films, videos and visual installations gathering together documents, sculptures and models. She takes ownership of images she borrows from genre cinema and scientific film that she then rearranges when editing. She’s particularly interested in scientific utopias and the communities they build, with a keen interest in how they are represented in cinema sub-genres. Her work explores the links there are between counterculture and posthumanism, their founding myths (New-age, cybernetics) and their dystopias.

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Laura Gozlan (b. 1979, France). She graduated from Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporai s, in 2007. From 2014 to 2017, her work has been exhibited at La Panacée – CCC in Montpelier, La Maison populaire de Montreuil, La Passerelle – CAC de Brest, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Le Magasin – CNAC in Grenoble, as well as at In Extenso in Clermont-Ferrand and at the Escougnou-Cetraro Gallery in Paris. Laura Gozlan was in residence at Mains d’OEuvre, Saint-Ouen, from March till August, 2016 and she is currently in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris since September, 2015.

images: Damian Griffiths