"You are Here"
exhibition by Louise Belin, winner of the 2023 Juvenars IESA Prize
Every year our Bachelor 1 Art Expertise and Trade students organize the Juvenars-IESA Prize from A to Z. This Prize supports young creation. The winner exhibits the following year in the IESA gallery.
Louise Belin, the 2023 winner, is exhibiting this year!
"Daydreaming. Bedrotting. Shifting. For her first solo exhibition, Louise Belin accompanies us through the unproductive drifts of mental fatigue and physical paralysis. Asleep here and awake elsewhere? Is the exhibition therefore an ode to our anxieties?
Does it rather invite us to flee them, by inventing a desired reality? To leave without leaving one’s room? Its title assures us so. You are here is the mantra the shifters repeat to themselves. In the middle of the gallery, a semblance of a bed, a duvet, and plastered pillows arranged in a spiral. On the walls, six oil paintings on wood adorned with embroidery, like so many supports for self-hypnosis.
Louise Belin takes aimless strolls through the depths of the Internet to glean low-quality images that feed her evanescent pictorial repertoire.
Driven by this hunt for poor images and her desire to escape the world, she scrolls. She wanders through forums where internet users share their quest for signs of extraterrestrial life. The nebulous photographs, captured on Mars by the Rover robot, act as blotting paper for her longings for elsewhere. This is the genesis of the series leave>ok.
The six paintings render these landscapes disoriented by a depth reduced to nothing. Compressed, pixelated, they share the qualities of the images they imitate. The grayish colors and the puffy surfaces of the embroideries absorb the motifs. Only tired traces remain, making the narrative impossible to identify with certainty.
Anchor points, if there are any, trap our gaze: arrows, red circles, framed zooms, and other symbols typical of clickbait. Yet these floating signs point nowhere, except to the void of an inhospitable world from which one must escape. You are here is the way out." Alexia Abed
