Pratiques III: L’Apesanteur

Public Commission for the new Mediathèque in Sorgues

2010

CLEARY CONNOLLY

CONTACT  / CV&BIO  / PRESS / ARTIST’S STATEMENT

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. La Pesanteur
                  

2. The modest and heavy jump of La Pesanteur is placed like a lintel above the rest of the glass bay. Below it, occupying the first two levels of the glass bay, is a second work printed on glass, also based on a movement workshop with Cecile Proust. Here too the children leap into the air, but this time the focus is not gravity, but weightlessness (l’Apesanteur). That divine, innocent, childlike state we find in the paintings of Tiepolo. Unfortunately the kids in Sorgues don’t have wings: we used a trampoline, and Cecile worked with each of them taking great high leaps into the air to achieve a split-second moment of beautiful weightlessness. It was these split seconds that we photographed, collecting moments when the body seems to escape gravity and they became this composition of floating forms printed on the glass bay. Once again, the eye’s perception is challenged: they could be weightless—like Tiepolo’s angels—or skydivers, plummeting towards the earth so fast that gravity is suspended
   

In many ways the most significant part of our intervention in Sorgues, the two installations on glass work in counterpoint: each studying the leap: one expressing gravity; the other expressing weightlessness. From inside the hall they are perceived separately—but work together as a single composition from the outside, in the evening light.