A Low Hum

A Low Hum

It is said that some shop windows incorporate false reflections, cosmetically enhanced to highlight the object and better capture the gaze. It is also said that, sometimes, objects shine simply because we look at them too much, leaving behind a mental glow. Perhaps it’s just an effect, something at the periphery of things, or the ordinary low-frequency paranoia, this latent humming. In her essay Revenge of the Mouse Diva, Rhonda Lieberman describes the moment when, you find yourself at home with the desired product, you realized you’ve ultimately purschased only a fragment of the scenario, and that “fantasy deflates like a dead balloon: your purchase becomes a partial reminder of a mise-en-scène that becomes increasingly obscure (…)”

Shiny surfaces sparkle with promises and little alienation to take home. Yet a vague disappointment looms. Capital distorts space and shapes affect, directs desires, distributes attention. The city becomes a mirror of a neoliberalization of subjectivities, caught up in this whirlwind, that produces a sense of distance. A constantly delayed self-realization, in which ready-to-wear fantasy adjusts to our fatigue. After all, malaise monetizes pretty well. And what if those flashes of paranoia weren’t just anxiety, or a moment of confusion, but simply a way of being there and floating, filling holes, failing, “I was a beautiful little ghost.”

Inefficiency, error, obstructed communication (it is still an address), the works in the exhibition attempt to open up loopholes from these scripted spaces. A Low Hum is filled with an economy of special effects, obsessive motifs, and distortions. You have to rub your eyes to check that it’s real, still real.

A Low Hum spirals. Feelings of disaffection and ambivalence stem from the contradictions between the producing subject and the produced subject. One endlessly replaying itself in the other. No clear escape, no spectacular refusal. Only a line following a shifting movement. We go round in circles, again and again, it’s that frequency, “life was repetitive, resonated at a low hum.”

In Benjamin Magot’s paintings Fond perdu and Quelques jours plus tard, there is neither reflection nor doubling, only a slow shift, an almost imperceptible interval. From one frame to the next, day/night, nothing really changes, except perhaps the passing of time itself.

In her collages, Lorenza Longhi repurposes materials that may not have fulfilled all their promises. Combining elements and references, she handcrafts boxes, close to industrial packagings with tired surfaces, maybe some anomalies, where past trends and relentless makeovers replay, in miniature, the cycles of products and information supposedly calibrated to survive the re-edition of contemporary taste and our dear sense of belonging in the city. Classics, still able to make an impression, desire encoded in permanence.

The jumper shop (le magasin de pulls) has been replaced by a suit shop (le magasin de costumes) where Fabienne Audéoud has “embroidered holes”*. Thetimeless colors of power that we wear, suits that we slip on with class relations woven into into them. The role begins the moment we put them on. The garments in My Father’s Suits, Sewn with Holes have been repaired inside out, not to be restored, but to be aired out. Incomplete, the power also fray.

“A door the size of a painting”*, Jordan Derrien’s works create thresholds where they leave us. A series of matte black paintings with muted surfaces where there is nothing to see, or rather, a pictorial space in which to project oneself. Each is marked by the same number: a loop within a loop, within a loop. The domestic treatment applied to the painting is haunted by the figure 8, circulating in a locked space.

Inès Kivimäki incorporates technological elements, in True Lies, she places a circular monitor—eye, lens, hole— and projects a zoomed-in perspective of the exhibition that monitors itself. We are outside but inside. There is what is seen and what has been seen, attention literally perforated. The devices lie with precision, like a lock that turns endlessly (Burr Hole). Finally, an old MacBook (Proofpoint) left open suggests that someone has seen something, and that the form, somehow, is always the same.

Fiona Vilmer

Thanks to Jade, Vincent, Fabienne, Jordan, Inès, Lorenza, Benjamin, Corey and Ludovic.