Still-Life — In Situ Gallery, Fabienne Leclerc — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 17 → February 16, 2013

Still-Life is both a play on words, as in, it is still… life, or used as an adjective such as still (not moving) life, or as a compositional tool for depicting an inanimate object, as in, still life of vase with flowers. Andrea Blum’s interest in still life merges all three references together. With a taste for irony, the artist looks for a subject that can express the project’s intent and function as the still life, or center-piece, of its entirety. Establishing the part, she is then able to construct the whole.

The 2 sculptures in this exhibition each contain a still life with plant material and provide a way into the materiality of another environment. In both cases the still life creates a fiction to counter-balance the functionality of the object. Blum often used living things in her work, such as birds (Babel and Birdhouse (currently at La Conservera, Murcia Spain) animals Untitled, In bed with a cold blooded animal, and fishes Loveseat and Aquarium as mechanisms to disrupt the sense of boundaries. In these projects she and they become partners in creating tableaux in comparisons, species to species, and us to them.

In Cactus and Table Rock Plant, the plant life resembles the sculpture in which it is housed. Both projects can be used as a table, or desk, or remain inert as an object, changing from something identifiable to something appearing to be abstract. The question of where we are in relation to what we see is the common thread throughout the work. Though the question remains the same, the execution takes different forms. Be it a design for a house, an object of furniture, a stage set for an opera, or using the computer to make virtual drawings, the ambiguity of a form as something we look at or something we use, merges our activities with the object itself.

Andrea Blum is a New York based artist who designs work for Public Space in Europe and the United States that range in site and scale to include urban space, parks, exhibition design, libraries, domestic space, and furniture. She has had numerous solo exhibitions including Stroom Center for Art & Architecture, Den Haag; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; and Storefront for Art & Architecture, NY. Blum has made special projects for the 2005 Venice Biennale, Maison Rouge, Paris, the MUDAM Museum in Luxembourg, and La Conservera Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Murcia Spain.