Les Modules / Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent — Spermwhaler’s Dream — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: July 8 → September 4, 2011

Vincent Chevillon draws on a mythology that is very much influenced by 19th century discoveries. The artist brings together a number of images relating to the great maritime epics and exploratory expeditions to unknown territories to create sculptures, photographic images and installations.

Following the model of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, or Albert Kahn’s Archives de la planète, Vincent Chevillon has made a computer program that allows new representations to be composed from images constituting the imaginary travel notebook of an explorer at the dawn of the 20th century, where History and stories are intermingled in a cross-fade technique. Like mnemonic traces, these “degenerate images” act as a context and inspiration for him to devise sculptures of a hybrid nature. The Sondes series, totemic sculptures made from rough, simple materials (wood, steel, concrete), is reminiscent of potential tools evoking premonitions of industrial-scale fishing.

Through their arrangement in space, installations such as these encourage the elaboration of fictional scenarios simultaneously bringing to mind James Cook, Dumont d’Urville, Herman Melville and Jules Verne. With this project entitled Spermwhaler’s Dream, Vincent Chevillon puts forward an assembly that refers back to a mythical universe where anything is possible, oscillating between outdated technological discoveries