Introduction

0:08

>> Following her studies in Visual
Arts at University of Ottawa, Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre completed
a master’s degree in Art History

0:16

at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her interests focussed on themes of
identity and cultural issues explored

0:24

through contemporary art practices. She worked at SBC contemporary art gallery and
Darling Foundry in Montreal before getting hired

0:33

in 2017 as Curator of Contemporary
Art of the Musée d’art de Joliette.

0:39

She invited Shannon Bool to create a new body
of work that was presented at the Musée in 2018.

0:45

As the exhibition titled The Shape of Obus.

0:50

In Joliette, she organized exhibitions
with Kapwani Kiwanga, Leisure, Jin-me Yoon,

0:57

[inaudible] and Elizabeth Zvonar among others. And we are fortunate to be with today,
Shannon Bool, joining us from Berlin

1:09

where she has been living since 2001. She is Professor of Painting at
the Academy of Fine Arts in Mainz.

1:17

Her works are part of renowned museum
collections such as Kunstmuseum Bonn, Metropolitan Museum of Art New York,
National Gallery of Canada, to mention a few.

1:26

I’ve already mentioned her most recent
solo exhibitions, and she has participated

1:32

in important group exhibitions
across Europe and North America. She is represented by Daniel Faria in
Canada and Kadel Willborn in Düsseldorf.

1:43

So take it away at Shannon and Anne-Marie. >> Thank you, Sunny, for the introduction.

Shannon

1:50

Hi, Shannon. It’s nice to see you from afar. [Chuckles] >> Hi, Anne-Marie, and —

1:57

>> Hi, to everyone. >> Nice to see everyone come out, and
thanks for the introduction, Sunny.

2:05

And thanks also for the wonderful work together
on the latest rendition of the exhibition.

Exhibition Titles

2:13

So shall we just start with the studio? We’re going to share some video footage.

2:20

>> Exactly. Yeah. Just shared my screen where you’ll see
the video that runs through the exhibition.

2:27

So you get a sense of the spacing of the
work through Agnes Etherington galleries.

2:33

But first I wanted to talk about the
different titles for this exhibition.

2:42

The — as Sunny said, the exhibition was first
presented at the Musée d’art de Joliette in 2018

2:50

under the title The Shape of Obus. It then went to the Canadian
Cultural Centre in Paris

2:58

under another title Promiscuous
Rooms in the spring of 2019.

3:05

And then under the title House of Oblivion in
the fall 2019 at the Kunstverein Braunschweig.

3:13

And now it’s Modernism and Its Discontents
at the Agnes Derrington Art Centre. And what this highlighted is how the show
changed throughout its different iterations

3:25

with Shannon adding to the first
body of work new works each time. I think that idea was to also respond to
the different architectural components

3:40

of these different spaces where
the exhibition was presented. So that’s something that I
thought I could start up from

3:47

and address maybe this new title
Modernism and Its Discontents at the Agnes Derrington Art Centre.

3:58

>> Yeah, sure. This is the fourth show where the body of work
has grown from the Shape of Obus from Joliette

4:06

in 2018 where the work was very much focussed
on a kind of response to Le Corbusier,

4:15

a very specific project of Le
Corbusier has planned Obus, which is one of the first biggest urban
planning projects that wasn’t realized

4:27

but one of the first massive
urban planning projects. And the associated kind of unconscious material
that went with that, his erotic drawings

4:37

and other impulses that inform modernism. And in that show I was also looking a little
bit at some spaces like [inaudible] and looking

4:47

at figures like Picasso and The Harem which
is also a connection to earlier bodies of work

4:53

of mine where I was quite deep and
looking at harems for the past 10 years.

4:59

And so in this exhibition the work
has culminated and there’s a lot of different embroidery,
tapestries, photography, painting,

5:11

and it centres around this critique of modernism
or these ideas of modernism that are we’re kind

5:19

of unconscious or hadn’t been
unpacked in my opinion until now.

5:27

And this is a combination of really looking
at sexuality and images of sexuality

5:33

that were explored by painters
or artists in those times.

5:40

And how they also correspond to
the way we look at space now. And the way that we look at
this early part of modernism.

5:49

So Modernism and Its Discontents
I came across the title.

5:55

There’s a book about a Sibyl Moholy-Nagy,
who was Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s wife

6:01

and she was a very prominent figure
in the early modernists movement.

6:06

In contact with a lot of
architects and artistic voices.

6:12

And I just thought this title was so
fitting for the station of the show.

6:17

And it also corresponds, of course, to Sigmund
Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

6:25

And it’s really, I have a lot of maybe
alternative narratives that we’ll see

6:32

in the work, information, ideas,
associations, a lot of associations,

6:39

a lot of unconscious desires that I kind
of bring up that maybe we haven’t thought

6:45

about before when we look at modernism. >> Also the things that I thought about when
I first read your title for this [inaudible]

modernist architecture

6:53

of the exhibition is how modernist
architecture blurs the boundaries

6:59

between private and public spaces. And that is also with theme that you, that
runs through the body of work that you’ll show

7:08

through the view that is that are
shown in [inaudible] art centre.

7:13

>> Exactly. A perfect example of that is the first
tapestry that the camera’s going to pan in on

women in their apartment

7:22

which is maybe we can start the video. So this is a tapestry a Jacquard tapestry and
it’s woven based on a collage that I’ve built

7:36

on the computer but then the
information is all woven together. It looks in photographic form like a
print of some sort but it’s interwoven.

7:45

And it’s called Women in Their Apartment which
is a reference to Delacroix and his painting

7:51

of harem or his rendering of
a harem in the 19th century. And so I was looking at building a harem
in a modernist space but I really came

8:05

to this association, this is my association
from looking at the drawings of Picasso

8:11

in his [inaudible] sketch series. So before he made his [inaudible] series of
paintings he did a very large series of sketches

8:22

where the female bodies like
slowly dissolve into cartoon like,

8:28

kind of really convoluted
characterizations of the female body.

8:36

And maybe we’ll just pause it here. So we can, yeah.

8:41

Where do you want? Yeah, so it’s clear. So what I found is I was looking
at sketches from the Femme d’Alger

8:50

and they were, one of them stuck in my head. So this is, this will show you a
little bit of my working process.

8:56

I don’t research and read and go to the library and then put things together
with a very scientific approach.

9:05

It’s very intuitive approach. And it usually comes from my own
associative field based on my interests

9:14

in certain veins of art history often. And so in this case, I had this
this Femme d’Alger sketches,

9:23

and I looked at one and it
reminded me of something. And then I realized it reminded me of this
viral photograph of Kim Kardashian’s butt

9:32

that was on the cover of paper magazine. In 2014, I think.

9:37

And so I just took the photo of Kim
Kardashian from paper magazine and lifted it

9:44

out on the computer and Photoshop. And I put it on the Picasso
sketch and it fit like a glove.

9:51

It just went click. And then I thought, okay, there’s
some lineage happening here.

9:56

There’s some lineage happening with
the body, and the body in space.

10:02

And then I needed, too, I wanted to
make a harem setting for these bodies.

10:10

And so I had been doing this work with a
lot of work looking at the private villas

10:17

that Le Corbusier designed
mostly in the 20s and 30s. And there’s this famous bath,
bathroom which is open.

10:27

It goes open from the living
room in the Villa Savoye, just outside of Paris that I visited as well.

10:34

And this is in the tapestry, it’s made
from an image of this open bathtub

10:40

which is also quite square, and
it looks it looks quite dangerous. And then there’s a chaise lounge
that you can lie in in the back.

10:54

And I collage the figures and the Kim
Kardashian butts into this space to make a kind

11:04

of meeting point for different associations
and ideas about modernism and the body.

11:10

>> You put it on play again and we’ll
see — we saw some of the weaving.

11:18

Ah no, we’re leaving it now. >> I can go back.

11:23

Voila. >> Good. Thank you. So you can see here if you come closer
to the, as we come closer to the image,

11:32

there’s also hand embroidery that will come
up in another work, which is I embroidered

11:38

in the window a very graphic pattern
of flowers which is from Roman tiles.

11:46

It’s a very graphic pattern
that I’ve used in several works. And that work is hand-embroidered.

11:52

And there’s also some hand embroidery
on the tiles and on the figures. But maybe I hope that it communicates
a little bit on the computer screen.

12:00

It’s a shame digitally to see
the work and not physically, because you can see the woven quality
of the work if you get close to it.

12:10

So I think the cinematographer, he does
focus on some of these woven moments.

12:17

We’ll see some of the woven moments also, here
you can see a close-up of the figure and you see that it’s very in the weaving itself, the
weaving takes place at 18 pixels as opposed

12:31

to a photographic image which would
be 300 pixels per centimetre inch. So it’s a very kind of dissolved visual language
where things can really be blended together.

12:44

So it’s a different language than
painting photography to work with textiles.

12:51

And also the idea of working with the
textile, which you’ll see as a vein going through the work, is that we have these ideas
about architecture, and space, and modernism,

13:00

and they’re very carved in stone. They’re very non-negotiable, static, concrete.

13:10

And I like to approach these ideas with a soft
material or a feminine material which uses

13:19

in a way, has a different way to
enter into the content of the work.

13:24

>> It’s funny that you say you
were looking at the figures first

13:29

and then you thought about this context place. Then this bathroom of Le Corbusier because
through our research and our conversation,

13:37

when we prepared the exhibition, one
thing that I found out that I didn’t know

13:44

about is how Le Corbusier was really
inspired by Picasso in his own drawings

13:50

because Le Corbusier drew a lot also. And so that connection between the figures
and the architecture then makes a lot

13:59

of sense also in that connection. >> Yeah, but that’s exactly how I came to
the Villa Savoye, was the fact that I read

how i came to the villa

14:09

about Picasso and Le Corbusier being friends. And some historians think that that
Picasso got into the harem content

14:21

through the Le Corbusier’s Algerian drawings, because they met around the time
before Picasso began his studies.

14:29

So Le Corbusier was really influential
in this modernist painting trend

14:35

of painters examining the harem
[inaudible] discussed anyways.

14:43

>> And so in this first room, there’s
the tapestry Women in Their Apartment.

14:49

And then there’s also a silk painting
that we just saw very briefly.

14:56

And then there’s this installation
or small assemblage of a photograph

15:01

with a marble table called Sugar Veins and
NC Sleeping Chamber with Casbah Extensions.

15:11

That is also about Le Corbusier. >> Yeah, exactly. This is also a kind of appetizer to the
bigger body of work in the next room.

the second room

15:21

So I can just mention maybe
quickly that the photo and then — oh, yeah, this is another Kim Kardashian
reference with the lines of cocaine.

15:31

Maybe I’ll talk about that one first. This is this is a work really about
the game of perception and materials,

15:38

and it’s based — oh we’re, hey let’s —

15:43

>> I’ll go back. It goes back. >> I’ve never done an artist talk like this.

15:48

I feel like I’m on a magic carpet or something.

15:53

[Chuckle]. >> [Inaudible] speak about the
marble table first or the photograph, so I can zoom in the right
[inaudible] of the image.

the photograph

16:00

Let’s just stick with the photograph. Okay. And this is a photogram actually,
or it’s a photograph that’s made

16:09

with negative clear foil prints
that have been collaged together,

16:15

and like roughly taped together. And this is a photo of Le Corbusier’s private
bedroom and the N24 apartment in Paris

16:24

that he designed, at the same time
around the plan Obus was designed.

16:30

And this is an example also of the — I
don’t know, it’s kind of like the cave of all

the bedroom

16:38

of the ideas like the origin
of all of the ideas. It’s a private space and this is
one of the most modernist architects

16:47

in his private space is built. Like, it looks like an extension of the Casbah,

16:52

so the ceilings are low and
there’s a lot of curves. The shower is kind of like a pizza oven.

16:58

I mean I’ve been to the flat in Paris. It has, everything is really curved
in little nooks and crannies.

17:04

And right in the middle of
the bedroom is the bidet. >> Yeah, that we see just here.

17:10

>> Yeah. So this is this division of
private and public also plumbing and toilet,

17:17

its feature is very in the forefront
of Le Corbusier was obsessed with hygiene and bodily functions.

17:22

But this also connects to the other works
with [inaudible] that are coming up.

17:30

Anyways, so I took two of the doorways of the
room and I collaged passageways from the Casbah

private fantasy

17:39

and Algiers where the Obus plan was designed. So this was kind of a, it’s kind
of a vision of a private fantasy,

17:49

or it’s my fantasy of my projection. I don’t know what Le Corbusier was
thinking about when he went to bed.

17:55

But there’s a lot of really, there’s a lot
of really strange details in the photo.

18:00

Like the bed was raised so he could
see the landscape outside the window,

18:07

because the windows are higher, it’s
on the top floor of the building. >> And also the carpets that we see here that
we’ll see the pattern of that types of carpets

carpet

18:21

in tapestries that we’ll
see later in the exhibition. >> Exactly.

18:27

This is an example of the — Le Corbusier was a
big collector of Algerian and Moroccan textiles

18:33

and carpets that were serrated
into the different Paris villas.

18:38

And then this shelf here,
it’s called Sugar Veins.

sugar veins

18:43

And this is another connection to the
Kardashians which come as also this kind

18:50

of harem fantasy, private and public. And this is based on a story
that was in the media that I saw.

18:57

I think at the end of 2019 that
Kim Kardashian was promoting a line

19:03

of baby clothes and she was in a hotel. And then over her shoulder behind her it
looked like there were two big lines of cocaine

19:10

on a marble table and the press caught up on
it or someone Instagrammed it and Tweeted it.

19:16

And it became a huge thing. And then she came online the next day on her,
on Instagram and said no it wasn’t cocaine.

19:25

It’s the marble table. And then she showed this angle of the table
where the veins look exactly like cocaine

19:33

at the angle that she was
sitting at the day before. So for me it was this idea
of fantasy and materiality,

19:41

and how you can misread materials so easily.

19:52

So the lines that we see just over
here were your addition to the market.

19:57

>> Exactly, it’s marble powder. It’s just marble powder.

20:03

Yeah. >> And then we move to the next room
where there the room is divided in three.

20:13

There’s a first part where
there’s a big tapestry and a series

20:20

of small embroideries with this mural. The second part, I’ll just stop it here.

20:28

The second part is there’s two tapestries.

20:33

And then in the third part of the room there’s
a series of photograms called Bombshell.

20:40

So for the first part of this bigger room in
the exhibition, we focus first on this tapestry

20:49

that is called the four season that mimics
the pattern or uses the same pattern

20:56

as the marble shell that we just spoke about. And this is the view of the men’s
bathroom in the Four Season Restaurant

21:05

in the C room a building in New York
designed by Mies van der Rohe with a pool

21:11

of flowers coming out of the [inaudible].

21:18

>> Exactly. A very nicely described, Anne-Marie.

21:24

Yeah, this is , this tapestry
uses again a photograph, and the tapestry language
here again is important

21:34

because we have these very factual
non-negotiable materials of marble

21:40

and wood veneers that are in the men’s bathroom
of the Four Season’s very famous restaurant.

21:47

It was one of the last [inaudible]
restaurants in New York. And, sadly, it was sold, and dismantled,
and redecorated about two years ago.

22:00

But I I’m not sure, I think the bathroom,
the men’s bathroom might still be the same.

22:06

I think it’s under heritage. >> It’s still the same, the men’s
bathroom [chuckle] is the same. >> Is it still the same? I want to find that out.

22:13

So I had this photograph and I really
wanted to make a tapestry of it. So, again, I have this kind of instinctual way
of working where I wanted to do an intervention

22:25

with the bathroom somehow to
collide with this materiality.

22:31

But I also liked this aspect of the men’s
bathroom being the most private area of the space, the stalls.

22:40

And I wanted to put something feminine into it. And so I decided to put the
train of a woman’s ball gown

22:49

like it was stuck in the bathroom door. And so I actually, I researched — this is when
you’re an artist, and you say I researched —

23:00

actually I just looked at like
hundreds of ballgowns from the met ball,

23:07

different paparazzi events,
and tried several out.

23:13

And the one that fit the best was
from , it’s from the Met costume gala. It’s an Alexander McQueen gown from 2016, it
was worn by Bee Shaffer who’s the daughter of —

23:24

>> Anna Wintour. >> Anna Wintour’s daughter.

23:30

And I really liked the fact that it had these
hand-embroidered flowers throughout the dress and in the train.

23:36

So I had the train, I clashed
it so it was stuck in the door.

B Shaper

23:42

And then, I had it woven in black and white and then the flowers are
hand-embroidered into the gown.

23:48

So if we — maybe there’s a close-up
where the audience can see it.

23:58

I think the cinematographers may go in now. >> What’s interesting is also
you said earlier how you wanted

24:07

to represent modernist architecture
through a more feminine or [inaudible] materiality with the tapestry.

24:15

And here, the marble really brings an organic
field to an architecture that is very rigid

24:22

in the lines of the architecture itself. And you’re going in that
direction by adding the flowers.

24:30

So you’re highlighting that sort of contrast
between the materiality of the marble

24:35

and the lines, the very sharp
lines of the architecture. >> Yeah, exactly.

Formal Game

24:41

It’s kind of — I like to
play with these tensions. And I think for this one, there’s this
there’s also this other very formal maybe kind

24:54

of a game. Or attention, where the hand-embroidered flowers
are the most fake thing in the whole mix.

25:06

So the marble and the and the veneer, they’re
representing themselves or like real materials,

25:13

and the fake material, the most synthetic part which is the natural beautiful fluid
is actually the most synthetic part

25:20

with the hand embroidery. And so there’s this kind of clash between
the expectation of feminine, masculine,

25:27

and also the associated narratives of what is
this train doing stuck in the bathroom door?

25:34

You know like, it could be a
number — five different things. I’m not going to name them, but I like this this
formal game, but also this game of what happens

25:45

in the corners of the architecture,
what kind [inaudible] play out.

25:50

>> What’s disclosed, and what’s
visible and invisible, and image.

25:57

>> Exactly. >> Yeah, [inaudible]. >> Of decadence. I mean I think I’m looking also at the
decadence, and the not necessarily against it.

26:11

I’m just, you know, looking at different
things that happened with the opulence of the materials, and that will
lead us to the embroideries.

26:19

And I think that the cinematographer focussed
on the [inaudible] embroidery which is

26:25

where we can, that’s where really
the origin of this decadence.

embroideries

26:30

But this is a series of embroideries that
I’ve done over the past couple of years

26:38

where I started a process of silkscreening
architectural plans onto fabric.

26:46

First, this is one of the first ones. This is from the Villa Savoye.

26:53

And then I started to make a type of blueprint where I would hand-dye silk
in a dark blue colour.

27:00

And then silkscreen — we can stop here maybe. This is this is an example of the blueprint,
type embroidery where I did a, I dyed silk

27:14

and then silk screened a plan over it. This is an architectural plan from the Italian
architect Carlo Molino from, he lived in Turin,

27:23

and he was very surrealist very
decadent, made amazing interiors.

27:31

He was obsessed also with the female body. And he had a secret life and a secret
flat that was discovered after his death.

27:40

And it had thousands of Polaroids of women in
dress or posing with furniture that he designed.

27:49

He also designed very amazing furniture.

27:55

So this is again a private villa. I think most of the embroideries I
used villas or private domestic spaces.

28:06

And then after doing the silkscreen I just
looked at different elements of the plan

28:12

that spoke to me from the point of view
of, okay, how could I am embroider this?

28:18

And then I went into the language of samplers
or when you look at, historically, embroidery —

28:24

a lot of embroidery exist on the basis
of teaching people how to embroider. So in some of the most beautiful
embroidery is samplers

28:32

where you have different stitches being learnt
as they’re going through one kind of piece.

28:40

So I worked, actually I had
a little team in my studio. We worked together, and we would
be playing off of each other,

28:50

or saying, oh let’s try this stitch. Or I might be in a different place.

28:56

And I’ll WhatsApp an idea, hey, try
and do some tic tac toe on this area.

29:02

So these works are very playful. And I guess this authority of the plan
is the most authoritative structure.

Farnsworth House

29:11

If you look at architecture especially. Or anything. And for me this is a way of kind of penetrating
this master plan with a different language.

29:25

So this is another good example. This is the Farnsworth House which
comes up in another tapestry coming up.

29:32

And I really liked especially Mies van der
Rohe plans, also the way they’re drawn,

29:38

and the way they’re drawn,
the way they’re presented. And this one really lent itself
to a very traditional sampler

29:47

of trying out different stitches. And so we have, yeah, here we have the
games of tic-tac-toe and practices.

29:57

Just different things that I found from
looking at Victorian samplers mostly.

30:05

And actually I was in Sicily and my
studio manager was working on this one

30:11

and I was working on another
one, and we were communicating on WhatsApp and trading ideas and stitches.

30:21

But for me I guess it’s a different, it’s
just a different narrative in the space.

30:26

Like I don’t presume to take
down these [inaudible].

30:32

It’s not also a huge critique
on modernism leaving out women. It’s more for me a space to play with
visual language that wasn’t played

30:43

out before but it was always there. So the story of the Farnsworth House
is very much about Edith Farnsworth

30:50

and her relationship to the architecture. And she’s the client who
commissioned Mies van der Rohe.

Alfred Lewis

30:57

And this one is a bit more playful. This is a building from Adolf Loos
who’s kind of the father of modernism.

31:05

He’s a very important architect
or very important figure for me. And a very difficult figure.

31:12

He was an architect. His first projects were around 1903

31:19

and he really informed modernism
in a lot of different ways.

31:25

He was the first, he was the first architect to forbid decoration, for
example, in his buildings.

31:33

But then if you see his buildings and his flats,
they’re so specific with materials and function

31:41

that those aspects of the
buildings become decorative. And he was a very famous writer and he
wrote this famous essay Ornament And Crime,

31:50

that Ornament and Crime that every art student
I think should read or anyone who’s interested

31:56

in art should read that if you want to
learn about this period of modernism where the language was shifting away
from ornateness and ornamentation.

32:06

But he was also, Adolf Loos was very
fetishistic in his use of material.

32:13

And I made a previous work
I think like 12 years ago. And it was based on a bedroom that he designed
for his then wife, that he had a bedroom

32:25

in his first flat that he designed for his wife,
and it was covered with fur and white fabrics. So angora fur covered the floor
and went inside the mattress.

32:37

And so this is a proposal that he made for a
competition for the Chicago Tribune building.

32:42

He didn’t win the competition,
but he made this building, design for a building that’s very phallic,

32:50

and I put embroidered fireworks
for the phallic building.

32:55

And I based my, again, I based my
embroidery here not in Victorian samplers

Villa La Roche

33:01

but on Valentino’s collection
from a couple of years ago where they were doing a lot
of fireworks embroidery.

33:07

Or here’s a night vision. This is the Villa La Roche from Le Corbusier,

33:13

it’s where also the foundation
of Le Corbusier is situated. [ Inaudible ]

33:21

>> You’re doing great. [ Laughter ] >> This is the Villa La Roche.

33:26

And so I dyed the cloth really dark. I wanted it to make it look like nighttime.

33:31

And then I replicated the colours of the
windows how they would look at nighttime.

33:36

Also looking at the colours
of the walls which are painted in different colours in the Villa La Roche.

33:43

>> So you’re not just using the floor plans
that shows how the interior spaces are organized

33:51

but you’re also using sometimes
views from outside. So you’re playing with the inside outside also

33:58

in your selection of material
for the embroidery. >> Yeah, exactly.

34:04

And, or also the inside spaces,
they’re really different sometimes.

34:10

They have different angles or different views.

Five Walls

34:18

>> So across from this wall. We’ll see the mural.

34:23

And this is an addition that you
did to the selection of works that were shown then at the
Kunstverein Braunschweig.

34:30

It’s where you first did the mural. And this is the new iteration
of that mural called —

34:36

>> Five Walls? >> Exactly. Five Walls.

34:42

Can you tell us more about
the choice of colours? Because I know the colours are
very specific to this story.

34:48

>> Yeah. >> For that mural. >> Well, this is this — this mural is based,
it’s actually just based on a photograph

34:57

of a building in the Weissenhof
Settlement, you know, Stuttgart in Germany.

35:04

And this is a neighbourhood which
has — it was a fair in the 1920s.

35:10

They made a fair for modernist
architecture, and there’s small show buildings

35:18

by many really important or famous
modernist architects including Le Corbusier

35:25

and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. They did like a twin house, a doubled
house in the Weissenhof-Siedlung.

35:37

And I went to visit it because
actually my husband made a film and filmed partly in the Villa.

35:42

And then I finally went to the
Weissenhof-Siedlung, and there’s this point

35:49

in the building where a few
spaces meet together. And because of the use of
the colour in that building,

35:57

it looks like a painting
or it becomes really flat. And so I wanted to represent that as a wall
painting, like as a painting that is in space.

36:09

So the colours are just based on
the colours that are actually there.

36:15

And Le Corbusier, he had a very
specific palette and use of colour

36:20

and in his villas, the colours
rotate and change. It’s very playful.

36:26

It has a lot to do with how the
colours correspond to each other. And so I just rendered this painting or actually
it was technician who did it for me because,

36:38

of course, I couldn’t go to
Kingston cause I’m in Berlin. And the woman who did it did a fantastic job.

36:49

So I have to credit Danielle for that. But I also there’s the addition
of a lamp on the mural.

Lamp

37:00

I don’t know, maybe if we press
play we’ll see it from the side. And this is this is a type of
lamp that Le Corbusier designed.

37:08

And they’re in the Villa La Roche. I don’t know if they’re in
the Weissenhof-Siedlung. But he would make lamps using just a
single pipe with a bulb on the end of it,

37:18

and put them on the side of walls
or hanging from the ceiling. Also in the Bombshell room I have
a very extreme use of these lamps.

37:28

Here you can see it. And so this also adds another
dimensionality to the space

37:34

that the lamp has coming out
at kind of like a third eye. And it becomes more extreme
in the Bombshell rooms.

37:44

>> Yeah. That we’ll see that just after. So behind the mural there’s two tapestries, Oued
Ouchaia and also Maison Locative Ponsik that are

37:56

from 2018 that plays with the buildings
that Le Corbusier was thinking of designing

38:04

for [inaudible] when he was in Algeria and
wanted to suggest different urbanistic plans

38:12

and also architectural plans to modernize
the city in their thirties and forties.

38:18

And you’re super imposing on those
buildings in the two tapestries drawings

38:24

that look obviously made of women in Algeria. So there’s two different
examples of that that we see here.

38:37

What’s really interesting. We pointed out in the image of Le Corbusier’s
apartment that we saw in the first room,

38:46

the carpet on the floor where we can see similar
designs that fill the bodies that you decided

38:54

to use to fill the bodies in
those in those tapestries.

38:59

>> These works are really complex and these
were the first works that I made for Joliette, so this is kind of the origin of the project.

39:09

And could we go back to the first one? >> Yeah. >> Thanks.

39:15

And so they were also very
difficult works to make because I had collected these
different elements.

39:24

I was looking at the Obus plan really
specifically and it’s a very problematic plan.

39:33

It’s the first plan of massive urban
planning but it was superimposed or tended

39:40

to be superimposed on Algiers to
make Algiers a European capital, and put it on the European map.

39:48

But also the idea was to just really rip
out the Casbah and make a superhighway.

39:55

And the super highway was supposed to be
curvy and Le Corbusier also in his diaries

40:02

or letters he wrote about how
the city of Algiers reminded him of a woman’s body, kind of undulating.

40:09

And one thing I learnt actually just
from watching a lecture from the 1990s

40:16

from Beatriz Colomina on
YouTube a few years ago, when I was looking at this specific project.

40:24

And she had a lecture where she was
looking at Le Corbusier’s graffiti on Eileen Grey’s E-1027 building that she
went into the origins of his graffiti.

40:35

And so in the origins of his graffiti
you go back 20 years to his own drawings

40:42

that were based on orientalist
postcards or actually hiring live models.

40:49

So he had kind of a secret drawing
practice that informed his natural cubism

40:57

and informed his paintings
that he developed years later.

41:02

And so out of these drawings, I picked — a lot
of them or most of them have pairs of women.

41:09

And the women are usually in some
kind of violent or sexual exchange

41:14

where they’re squished up against each other. They might be you know playing ball or fighting.

41:21

Or in this case I used a drawing of two women,
and this drawing is very difficult to find.

41:27

I found it on the Beatriz Colomina, her lecture.

41:33

But it’s two women engaging in [inaudible]
and I wanted to integrate the drawings

41:40

with the architecture because in the plan Obus,
there’s a lot of paired architectural drawings

41:45

where you have buildings shown
from two angles in pairs.

41:50

So it’s a similar language to the
drawings of the female bodies. And so in this case I have the drawing
exactly superimposed over this plan

42:03

and the plan is for a housing unit. So this is a very French housing unit for the
European Algiers, the Europeans in Algiers,

42:13

and in the plans it has a lot to do
with behaviour, with point of view. This is where you park the
cars, here’s a restaurant,

42:21

and you can actually see sight
lines determined within the plans. It’s more obvious in the second tapestry.

42:29

And then I superimpose the bodies of the
drawings with this interior information

42:36

of the carpets mostly from the Paris
villas and the carpets that were collected.

42:42

So I was looking at the language of Algierian
carpets, and I superimpose those on the bodies

42:50

to bring them into this domestic space
and to kind of veil them as well.

Sight Lines

42:58

>> And you’ve also hand-embroidered some details
throughout those [inaudible] in the body.

43:08

>> Yeah, exactly. There’s details in this case I
think on the bottom figure there’s,

43:18

a lot of the coloured details
are hand-embroidered. And the second one I hand-embroidered
a lot of the sight lines

43:26

because they also aided with
the Jacquard weaving.

43:31

And because this men which is a modular
men, we see the sight lines that we —

43:39

I’m pointing at the sightlines as if
he’s looking at the figures actually.

43:44

Exactly. Yeah. So you have in this case, this is another
building for intended European use.

43:53

And in the drawings we have the modular
man which is Le Corbusier’s kind of man,

43:58

of measurement, and proportion, and form.

44:05

And the sight lines show in every
building that you can see, the ocean. So whatever unit you decide to move
into, you’ll have a view of the ocean.

44:14

And this is displayed in several
parts of this particular drawing.

44:19

So I collaged this drawing with this view
of two women and they’re kind of head to foot squished up against each other.

44:26

And then the sight lines
are going through the bodies over to the ocean, but stuck at the bodies.

44:37

>> I think we’ll see a detail.

Bombshells

44:46

And then we go in the third part of this
second room where the Bombshell series is shown

44:53

with the colour that comes from the
different [inaudible] of Le Corbusier. And then the lamps that you
were talking about earlier,

45:01

and those images that show
superimpositions of oriental postcards

45:12

that Le Corbusier collected
while he was in Algiers.

45:17

He drew from life figures but he
also drew from those postcards

45:25

that he collected, if I remember correctly. And then you superimposed on top of those bodies
the urban plans that he developed for Algiers.

45:40

>> Exactly. >> [Inaudible] see close up. >> So this is the work again
it’s a photographic process

45:46

where I have the different
transparencies, and I collaged them.

45:51

So it’s a contact print, it’s a
type of [inaudible] contact print.

45:57

And this was a difficult body of work because
I had some kind of association with the plans

46:05

because I had the drawings of the plan Obus. And I was looking at them for many months and I
realized they really correspond to the bodies.

46:14

And then as I was looking at working
on the tapestries and looking

46:19

through the drawing process, and Le
Corbusier’s referenced postcards —

46:24

and he actually used some
of the postcards to trace. So some of the, if you look at his paintings,
some of the figures the origins are tracings

46:34

from these postcards that he collected.

46:39

And so for this body of work
I really had to glean through because there are
several archives of these photos.

46:47

They’re also they can also be very disturbing
and it was a very Eurocentric trend.

46:54

And it’s also a Eurocentric trend that informs
Orientalism and also connects in this regard

47:00

to the language of painting Delacroix,
Picasso, this fantasy of the harem

47:07

and this fantasy of women in private space.

47:12

So what happened is I was playing with these
transparencies and then I saw, oh my goodness,

47:19

they fit exactly like this
postcard fits exactly to this plan. It was almost too — it was
just too big of a coincidence.

47:28

So I worked with, I think
there’s 18 different bombshells. I called them bombshells because the word
Obus, the plan Obus means, it means bomb.

47:40

Or [inaudible] in French translates
from the word bomb or shell. So I put bomb and shell together
to make bombshell as a,

47:49

like exploding news or beautiful woman. So there’s this play with the content of Obus.

48:01

And this corresponding the plans to
this fetishization or exotification

48:09

of the female body which I think runs
through the whole project of Obus.

48:14

It’s also the orientalist postcards
don’t show the reality of these women.

Postcards

48:25

It’s a fantasy, it’s a construction,
it’s completely it’s theatre somehow.

48:31

And plans that Le Corbusier made to
modernize Algiers stayed a fantasy also.

48:43

They never got realized. So it’s also his fantasy of the
city that you combine together.

48:50

>> Exactly. Yeah. This was the first go a kind
of colonial urbanization that worked

49:03

in Shaandraar [assumed spelling] India. This one to the right is one
of the first ones I made.

49:08

And this is a postcard. This is the only image I found
where the postcard had a name,

49:14

and this woman was a famous dancer. And I found the structure
from Obus, and it kind of fit

49:22

on over her breasts like a
bra or like a bikini top.

49:31

So — — yeah, [inaudible] I wanted to pick images
that were really connected to painting

49:41

and Orientalism like example of the
[inaudible] here, we have this — this is very classic painting language.

49:49

And you can see this highway
that goes over the woman’s body. This was the highway that Le Corbusier
envision for the plan Obus that would drive,

49:58

he wanted to kind of demolish the Casbah. It would go through the Casbah, and under
the highway would be all of this housing

50:06

that was, I think it was mostly European. And then there were these superstructures
that go to the top of the figure.

50:16

[ Silence ]

50:26

Between these two body of works also
the tapestries that we studied before and the Bombshell series, it’s interesting to
see that there’s a reversal of the strategy

50:37

where the plan veils the
bodies in the photograms but in the tapestries the
bodies block the plans.

50:44

And so the power relationship between the figure
and the plan is different that the figures are

50:52

so big and the tapestry almost a takeover
the spaces that are supposed to contain them.

51:00

And here the plans somehow dress the
figures or camouflage the figures.

Tolex Chairs

51:10

>> The tapestry is, in the tapestries
the figures take over the architecture. They’re almost like monsters but they
become, they become monstrous in a way.

51:19

And here there’s a synthesis where in some
of the Bombshells, the figures become,

51:28

they look robotic or they or they’re veiled,
they’re covered by the plans in a way.

51:34

But you can see this very uneasy
relationship between the bodies and the plans.

51:40

So I have to say that these
works made me uneasy. I didn’t, you know, but I thought
it was important to make sure.

51:47

And then we walked in the final section of
the exhibition where we can see a series

51:56

of soap paintings that you made in 2019,
2022 two Tolix chairs that you transformed.

52:04

And the final tapestry called the
weather that was made in 2019.

52:10

So maybe we start with the chairs that you —

52:15

>> [Chuckle] Yeah. >> — that you made for the exhibition
in Brunswick, that we were so happy

52:20

to be able to bring to [inaudible]. >> Yeah, I was so glad to see
them in the exhibition here.

52:28

Yeah, I’m really happy that it worked out. And this is the Tolix chairs are very classic,
modernist chair that became mass produced

52:39

that you can see in millions of
restaurants around the world now. But the original Tolix chairs were quite —

52:47

they were quite famous and they’re in the
Villa Savoye, for example, everywhere.

52:53

And the company that makes
the Tolix chairs now or Tolix, they even collaborated with the Villa Savoye.

53:00

So when I visited it, there were a lot of Tolix chairs throughout the space
painted in the colours of the Villa.

53:08

And so I wanted to make a version of the Tolix
chair that was more suited to this the Women

53:15

in Their Apartment tapestry or this
idea of a contorted body or a woman with a really small waist, and a Kim
Kardashian kind of voluminous bottom

53:24

because the Tolix chairs are
very, they’re just square. So I did this really intensive material
process where I took Tolix chairs.

53:38

I cut the seats off or I cut a seat off. I had it cast in a rubbery
material and stretched it out.

53:46

And then I cast this version in bronze, and
then the bronze stretch seat was re-welded

53:55

and built to the original chair structure. So they’re called expanded Tolix chairs.

54:02

And then I painted them in
these pink-y aqua colours

Silk Paintings

54:09

that I saw when I was in the Villa Savoye.

54:15

[ Inaudible ] These little paintings. You can see them a little
bit from the cinematographer.

54:23

They really, this is really an example
of work that’s better to see in person because they’re made with chiffon silk.

54:31

So, again, I’m using a very feminine
material that has no place in high art.

54:38

And they’re made using batik technique. So I paint with wax, and then I use oil paint,
textile paint, different types of paint.

54:50

And then in the end, I iron out the wax. So I don’t really know how they’re also going
to turn out until everything is ironed out.

54:58

So they’re very labour-intensive paintings. And this series of paintings, there’s one
in the very first room of the exhibition.

55:04

I have structures that are
facades of [inaudible] architecture

55:11

or architectural buildings that I
build grids over on the computer.

55:17

So in this case I have a
very reduced cross pattern

55:22

and the other ones I use a
very standard modernist grid.

55:28

And then, so these layers are
painted on this transparent silk. And then instead of being stretched on a normal
stretcher frame, it’s stretched over a mirror.

55:37

So the painting reflects in the mirror and
your body will reflect into the painting

55:43

when you see the painting in person. So maybe if we play, you can maybe see
the cinematographer moving around and see.

55:53

And this is a classic grid painting. This is called Grid Naturel.

55:59

And so here you see the photo, here you can
see how the body is going through the painting.

56:07

So that’s more of what it’s like in real life. But they’re they have a more formal language of
low material, maybe low material contortionism

56:20

that I take something very static and
very factual like the modernist grid. It’s not really a negotiable subject,
but if you paint it onto a material

56:31

like chiffon silk you can negotiate it. It becomes transparent, it collapses in
a way, it reflects in a different way.

56:40

>> And then the mirror gives it some depth. Also it becomes unfixed because it changes while
you walk in front of it and there’s that back

56:54

and forth between the layer in front
and the layer behind being reflected.

56:59

So and you see yourself also in it. Suddenly it’s no longer a work
that functions only in itself

57:10

like the modernist idea of [foreign language]. In French, we say [foreign language]. Suddenly it reflects the context also.

57:21

So it breaks that idea of the modernist
grid by [inaudible] the context.

57:28

>> Yeah. It opens it up. Exactly. It opens it up to something else.

The Weather

57:34

And the structures that I’m referencing
are very strong concrete things.

57:45

And this is a very large tapestry — it’s
four metres by two, four by 270 or something.

57:55

It’s very mural-like. And this is a view from the
Farnsworth house looking outside.

58:04

And I found this image it’s a very
iconic image from the Farnsworth house,

58:09

and it has this big tree outside. And I called it the weather because for me,
this idea of the division of space and modernism

58:19

like the outside and the inside
erasing, you also have this with the five point systems
of Le Corbusier, the windows.

58:26

And the use of stall of steel from [inaudible]
enabled us to have giant windows like you’ve see

58:32

in the Neue Nationalgallery in Berlin. It’s a new structural thing. But it’s a very uncanny thing
because in my experience,

58:44

the more that humans opened
ourselves up to space and modernism the more we
realize how unnatural we are.

58:51

So I collaged this pattern which is again from
Roman tiles of flowers blooming into the tree.

58:59

But the picture itself is probably from
late fall or you know October, November.

59:05

So you have this blooming happening
totally outside of the season.

59:14

And Anne-Marie, you wrote such great stuff
about the history of the Farnsworth House

59:20

in your essay in my catalogue — the relationship between Mies van
der Rohe and Edith Farnsworth.

59:27

>> Yes. So the house got designed for Edith
Farnsworth was a doctor working in Chicago,

59:38

and the house is built a little bit
outside of Chicago, in Illinois. And she asked Mies van der Rohe to
design a house that, she was single,

59:50

so no children she was living alone and she
wanted a modernist house something avant-garde.

59:58

And when she got the house, she
realized that because it’s a glass house,

1:00:05

it’s completely open to the outside. And she felt as if it was a vitrine.

1:00:11

So she felt staged in her own house. And she had a hard time living in
the house thinking that, feeling,

1:00:19

experiencing that she couldn’t really do how
she wanted in the house not even placed anything

1:00:28

in the space without being concerned
about how it looks from outside.

1:00:33

And so she said that it’s supposed to be
liberating, those spaces because they’re open

1:00:41

and there’s not lots of walls, and
so you can circulate very easily. But at the same time it’s very constraining
how you can behave in those spaces.

1:00:50

And so she had a real hard time
living in the space at the end.

1:00:58

And they argued about the space
a lot after, about the house. So that’s really I think as a conclusion to the
exhibition showing your ideas around modernism,

1:01:13

it shows how that blurring of
interior and exterior spaces, and also private and public spaces.

1:01:22

You’re including all of your works a
narrative about pop icons, or social media,

1:01:30

or elements like that where
that blurring of what’s private and what’s public but gets shared.

1:01:37

And what’s just for oneself is
getting more and more difficult.

1:01:46

The line is getting more
and more difficult to fix. And this is something that I find that you, that
your work addresses through all sorts of ways

1:01:56

through the materiality of the work, through
the imagery of the architecture and the research

1:02:02

that you’ve that you address but also
through your allusion to pop icons

1:02:07

and popular culture in social media. >> Yeah. Thank you.

1:02:13

>> So that’s the final work in the
exhibition, that ends the tour,

1:02:20

the video tour of the space [chuckle].

1:02:27

>> Yeah. There’s the photo documentation. >> The colours are more accurate actually.

1:02:35

>> It’s really a lot about who is watching,
the point of view, where’s the point of view.

1:02:41

Is it from the outside? Is it from the inside?

1:02:46

>> Yeah, exactly. And a couple of self-paintings again, the
newest self-paintings in the exhibition.

1:03:00

>> So we did good. We did exactly one hour which means
there’s lots of time for questions.

1:03:08

If people have questions. >> Yes. Thank you both. First, I wanted to thank you for that. It’s such a wealth of really compelling,
exciting stories that are built into this work,

1:03:20

and that kind of come out of them
and [inaudible] you both went through in developing the projects.

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