Exposition de Joseph Nechvatal
Orlando et la tempête
Galerie Richard, 74 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris
Du 5 septembre au 21 octobre 2020
Mot de l’artiste :
Orlando et la tempête (Orlando and the Tempest) is a series of new virus-modeled artificial life paintings by Joseph Nechvatal that indirectly addresses issues of gender fluidity within our tempestuous viral and social-political times by imagining nonexistent scenes from the 1928 novel Orlando by Virginia Woolf (the story of an aristocratic young male poet who transforms into a woman overnight and lives a tumultuous life for 300 years).
Storms have no gender and mean full-blow fluidity. In Orlando et la tempête, the artist’s ambiguous Orlando avatar is embedded into just such noisy chaotic grounds to the extent that normal figure/ground relationships more-or-less merge, playing elusively with what is seen, what is suggested, what is repressed, and what is desired. Though viral issues and gender fluidity are culturally and politically topical, those subjects are nothing new to Nechvatal. In 2000, he exhibited Computer Virus Project II artworks (with artist’s statements) investigating virtual hermaphrodite complexity in his ec-satyricOn 2000 exhibition, and again in his 2002 show vOluptuary: an algorithic hermaphornology. He has continued to use viral and androgynous forms in his work, since. In 2018, he penned a pansexual art theory paper entitled Before and Beyond the Bachelor Machine that was published in Arts.
Retrouvez le descriptif complet de l’exposition sur le site : https://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/Orlando/Orlandoetlatempete.html