Artissima: Transformative Experience

with Bella Hunt & Ddc, Raphaël Emine, Bianca Lee Vasquez, Maël Gros

3 November — 6 November 2022

For this exhibition at Artissima, Sainte Anne Gallery presents works that are no less complex than the nature of the world by expressing different experiences of transformation, from fluid to solid, from blooming to wilting, from unfired clay to fired clay, from life to death. Raphaël Emine's suspended ceramic bowl, named Stoup #8, reclaims the technique of handmade ceramics that literally contains possible living worlds. The bowl will carry water lenses, an aquatic plant, and the processes of growth and death will be visible. His work suggests narratives steeped in fantasy and fantastic. Creating a possible visual experience that can be epistemically and personally transformative. We can enter into an ongoing exploration of this connection between humanity and nature. Bianca Lee Vasquez's living sculpture 'Tshaheylu', a girl sitting on a stool is deeply united by a braid of long hair to a plant hanging on the wall in a dynamic of primal reconnection with nature, in which the notion between inside and outside, the real and the imaginary is lost. Many of the visitors were surprised that both the plant and the person connected to it were real, as if in a world where fitness reigns supreme in the everyday collective imagination, the real, seemingly immobile presence, it was difficult to instinctively accept that reconnection with an ancient, earthly memory rooted in the exchange between human and nonhuman. The artist's work sets in motion a kind of ritual practice that feels to unmask the repressed experiences of modern society through a visual and sensory reestablishment that can reconnect us to our primal instincts.

Each piece poetically illustrates the human touch and a unique perspective of our environment. The mediums presented in the gallery are traditionally associated with women, such as ceramics, textile art, fiber art and performance art through a group of emerging and established artists of the French scene. This body of work embodies the fusion of conceptual and artisanal art and highlights an intimate relationship between the art world and the living world. We invite the viewer to reflect on the transformative ways of nature, in order to broaden our understanding of the current state of the world.