Work from the Collection

Black Maria (Phenomena Overwhelming Consciousness)

Artist: Isabelle Cornaro
Date: 2008
Materials: Pigment prints, Black-and-white slide projection
Dimensions: 80 x 60 cm
Collection: Lafayette anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin

Black Maria (Phenomena Overwhelming Consciousness) is an installation of slides taken from a book by the artist. The title refers to Thomas Edison’s film production studio, the Kinetographic Theater, known as “Black Maria”. The work consists of landscape photographs in which a female figure gradually appears through a progressive zooming in on the focal point and (digitally reproduced) drawings that make its schematic lines visible. Black Maria highlights the artist’s interest in the construction of space and its composition within a work, but also her analysis of systems of representation. The antagonisms generated by the encounter between figuration and abstraction, composition and decomposition, reveal complex links and call into question “the construction of the gaze” through the “deconstruction of frames of reference”.

Text written by Camille Philippon as part of the partnership between the École du Louvre and Lafayette Anticipations – Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin.


Exhibition

Antidote 5
La Galerie des Galeries, Paris (France)
from 20 Oct 2009 to 09 Jan 2010
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