Royal Garden 5 — Vegetal Passion — Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: December 13, 2013 → December 13, 2015

The online exhibition Vegetal Passion sees the exhibition space as the natural milieu of works of art.

The artist and curator duo It’s Our Playground (Camille Le Houezec & Jocelyn Villemont) has imagined this 5th installment of Royal Garden as an ambiguous jungle in which visitors will find artists’ pieces, archival photographs and images gleaned from the internet, all shown side by side without any obvious hierarchy.

Deftly mixing plants and works of art, works that involve plants and “exhibition plants”, this curatorial project takes a new look at gardening practices in institutional settings, which is increasingly a part of today’s reality.

Indeed, while blogs are replete with images of plants, which are adopted for their graphic qualities, they have also invaded art galleries, for artists appreciate their formal values as well as their reference to both a domesticated nature and a questioning of the decorative function of artworks.

Originally this project was based on exhibition photos (notably from the Marc Vaux and the Cahiers d’Art collections, which are conserved at the Kandinsky Library) from the 1940s to 1960s, an age of pre-standardized museum and exhibition design, when decorative plants seemed to naturally punctuate exhibition galleries.

This show also takes into account the recent proliferation of indoor plants in contemporary artists’ work. The images of plants and archival images of art exhibitions are thus mixed with images of recent works of art and specific projects by contemporaries, including Laura Aldridge, Ditte Gantriis, Hayley Tompkins, Travess Smalley and Pedro Wirz, who were invited to produce series of images that resonate with their usual art practice.

It’s Our Playground

Created in 2010, It’s Our Playground is an artist duo composed of artists Camille Le Houezec and Jocelyn Villemont.

Their website, www.itsourplayground.com serves as both a portfolio of their activity together and an artist-run space on the internet. Taking account of its context, the site’s home page is a playful, immaterial space that picks up on the qualities that are inherent to the internet (ease of access, practically without monetary charge, rapidity), to produce surprising narratives, deconstructing the hierarchy that usually reigns among documents.

In the real world, It’s Our Playground projects take the form of sculptures, exhibitions and installations, notably using curating as an artistic medium. In its projects, IOP pursues its analysis of the modes of display and exhibition, citation, and appropriation, achieving new hybrid forms.

Since September 2012, Camille and Jocelyn have codirected the independent exhibition venue SWG3 Gallery in Glasgow.