![\"Laquet-heels\"](\"http:\/\/sarahwalko.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Laquet-heels.jpg\")
<\/a>Christine Laquet, with voice by Lena Hawkins, \u201cIf by loved possessed\u201d (2013), video projection on a cylindric platform, high heels, loudspeakers, 8 min (all photos by David Spriggs, courtesy the artist)<\/p><\/div>\n
When I recently visited the exhibition CR(I)SES AD(JUST)MENTS (COLLAPSED)<\/i><\/a> at Flux Factory, a solo show by French artist Christine Laquet, I was immediately seduced by a white circular platform featuring red high-heeled shoes and imagery projected onto it from the ceiling. The images fluctuated between close-ups of slow-moving jellyfish and blurry snow scenes, and were accompanied by a captivating audio track. Titled \u201cIf by love possessed,\u201d the audio is an interview Laquet did with a \u201cDoctor in Monsterology\u201d \u2014 a discussion of what, where, and who could be the contemporary monster, read by a teenage girl.<\/p>\n The exhibition revolves around a mysterious, mythological, and even at times ambiguous idea of \u201cmonstrous metaphors\u201d that are born out of economic crashes. Laquet looks at the Great Depression of 1929 and how, in 1933, four years after Black\u00a0Thursday, King Kong became a popular icon in the historic birthplace of finance, in her own words \u201csimultaneously embodying the savage, the transgressive, and the monstrous.\u201d With this as her starting point, she examines our current situation and uses the exhibition as both a brainstorming session and an interpretation of metaphors that, according to the press release, \u201chave yet to arise.\u201d With an emphasis on and understanding of our need for mythology, Laquet is asking: what is the monster of our time?<\/p>\n Using historical documents, research, and her own ideas and imagination, she created films, performances, sculptures, and installations that morph into a exhibition full of symbols, slivers of compelling narratives, cultural projection, and literary reflection. The pieces stand separately but also flow into each other, with obscure borders. The opening for the show doubled a book launch for a publication in which she invited different writers to reflect on her ideas. (Full disclosure: I contributed a short piece.) As I made my way through the gallery and the book, I felt simultaneously absorbed and overwhelmed by the vast scope of the concepts being addressed. But only in experiencing them together did I clearly understand one point Laquet is emphasizing \u2014 that the monster metaphor today is a formless, transparent shape shifter.<\/p>\n Her use of glass is literal but not simple. She delves into its history and role in civilization, from the construction of buildings to the current use of fine fibers to reinforce a plastic matrix in fiber optics for the internet. She occasionally uses it more symbolically, as in a series of images based on Associated Press photographs of stock market traders from 1929. She couldn\u2019t get the rights to use them unless she paid, so she reproduced them instead, by drawing, enlarging, and finally silk-screening the images onto mirrored Plexiglass with a rainbow color, like the spectrum of light passing through the surface.<\/p>\n One central piece in the exhibition, titled \u201cTo Gain your own voice, you have to forget having it heard\u201d (a quote from Allen Ginsberg), is a dramatically edited 18-minute HD video of a performance that happened a month ago at Flux Factory, with deaf actress Alexandria Wailes and drummer Gerard Faroux. Laquet gave the actress three things: stock market traders\u2019 hand signals, Occupy Wall Street hand signals, and a list of financial words like \u201cfuture\u201d and \u201cmarket\u201d that Wailes translated to sign language. Laquet then asked the pair to create a strong relationship as they performed, despite the fact that the actress could not hear the drummer and the drummer could not understand the hand signals.<\/p>\n In the opposite corner of the gallery was a piece titled \u201cCreepy House, Act 1,\u201d an eight-minute video installation that Laquet shot in Roswell, Georgia. The images are of the outside of a haunted house, and she was accompanied by a ghost tour guide who points a flash light around the structure, offering us only shadowy glimpses of it. The audio track is a voice-over of a written adaptation of Shakespeare\u2019s The Tempest<\/i>.<\/p>\n Many critics think that The Tempest<\/i> was the last play Shakespeare wrote himself. One of its predominant themes is magic; another \u2014 probably because he was aging and contemplating his own life \u2014 is a treatise on the evolution of the human soul, particularly the Renaissance soul, which was thought to be divided into three parts: the sensitive, the vegetative, and the rational. In Freud\u2019s terms, these translate to\u00a0 the id, ego, and super ego. Certainly the concept of \u201cmonsters from the id\u201d is present in this exhibition, in two ways \u2014 the\u00a0fantastical\/theatrical and the straightforward, one that transforms the heavy into light. One vital part of The Tempest<\/i> is when Prospero, the main character, accepts himself, in the process acknowledging that he is half light and half dark as a human being. When he is able to accept his base, brutal nature (\u201cthis thing of darkness I acknowledge mine\u201d) and let go of magic, he returns to his course as Duke, asking agreement from the audience: \u201cas you from crimes would pardon\u2019d be, let your indulgence set me free.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n