We are delighted to invite you to the opening of Kelly Tissot’s first solo exhibition in Geneva, on Thursday, April 28 at 6 pm. Exhibition from April 29th to May 30th.
And suddenly, while nothing suggests such news could happen, we are shocked, being unaware, to discover what is taking place. Out of her living room, next to her window, Kelly Tissot removes the soul from objects to develop a formal anthropologization of daily life. We observe, in disbelief, a staging of objects which liberates the latter from their addresses and depersonalizes their artistic and domestic values. This makes us believe in their material reality. Family Portraits matches social symbols of the provinces with their symbolic powers. Embodied in objects of transfer, the uses of these symbols wish not so much to express but to acknowledge the real: motorcycle posters, pink straps, enlarged flies, enclosures for cattle that structure and act as points of view. These symbols totally deconstruct the present bodies that are transformed into the ghosts of the exhibition.
After leaving behind any comforting reception, your astonishment gives way to dread. The family is a series of photographic portraits of motorbikes and quads. They produce the unease of a historical fetish which re-enacts boomer and teenager codes that have decided to take refuge in the hormonal vestiges of their testosterone. The «photographic medium», a concept from the 20th century, is used in all its possibilities of exploration, from documentary investigation to advertising promotion, from low angle shots to fascinated branding, from faithful recognition to its extreme physical alteration. These photographs transcribe and sublimate settings which, removed from their original context, reveal the multiple traces of wear and tear - dust, straws, dirt, etc. - of these machines that have been parked in a dusty shed awaiting their future. If the sign in the photographs stages itself and is «personalise» with strings of flies, its referent (the motorbikes and quads) is stuck with its inactivation and reification.
Finally comes the moment when the comfort of the barriers makes you thirsty. You let go and abandon yourself completely to these family portraits in which the duplicity of the sentiment of belonging to a constructed system is restaged. It brings together brotherhoods as well as artistic networks that name and identify themselves. Conflicting affiliations and their multiple hierarchical branches are unjustified, in fact, they’re normalised and accepted. The barriers direct and compartmentalize our gaze, cannibalize and stock it - as if the works were here to accumulate symbolic capital - and feed on it to confuse kitsch aesthetics with working class issues. The flies get stuck into a row, like an ornament. They signal the moment of our disappearance through the advanced decomposition of our capacity to perceive within the obvious spectrum of logotypes. To the imaginary of an authentic countryside rooted in the earth, the serialization and mechanization of our perceptual regimes brings us back to the decomposition of our bodies and their affects.
Exhibition from April 29 to May 29.
Pictures by Remy Ugarte Vallejos
