A light
breeze can be felt as you enter a small room. The walls, illuminated
from below, are thin sheets of moving membrane - latex to
be sure - but very much like skin. The light makes the skins translucent
and smooth one moment, filled with surface detail at another. You begin
to see impressions, images and stories embedded into these membranes.
You have entered “La salle des peaux perdues,” Stéphane
Dumas’ sensuous and provocative investigation of myth, Christian
iconography, biology and memory.
Safe-T-Gallery will be the site for the first full scale installation
of Dumas’ very personal and evocative “skins.” These
are large latex sheets that have been poured and layered, impressed with
various ex-voto’s - eyes, legs, organs, and then hung from the
ceiling to produce close encompassing rooms and passageways. Dumas writes, “Skin,
as exhibited in The Lost Skins Room, is leftover veils, shed membranes,
peeled images revealing their thicknesses, their positive faces as
well as their negative imprints. Being simultaneously matter and image,
skin
here, is both the material and substratum of art; fragile, though enduring
as a memory anchored to its source.”
Stéphane Dumas lives and works in Paris, he received an MFA from
the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and will shortly be receiving his doctorate
from University Paris, Sorbonne, in Visual Arts. His thesis is an investigation
of “Creative Skin and the Marsyas Myth.” He has exhibited
previously in New York and in Europe and his work is included in
the Documenta Archives, Kassel, Germany, the collections of the
Museum
Ludwig, Cologne, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art
and the Whitney
Museum, New York.
La salle des peaux perdues (the title is a play on the French la salle
des pas perdus - the waiting room) will be exhibited from April 13 to
May 13, 2006 at Safe-T-Gallery in the heart of the Dumbo, Brooklyn with
an opening reception on April 13, from 6 to 8 PM. There will be a presentation
by the artist with video on Saturday afternoon, April 22nd from 2 to
3 PM. On the evening of May 4 at 7 PM there will be readings by writers
Tom La Farge and Wendy Walker and poets Jessie Stead and Bethany Wright,
which will relate both to “The Lost Skin’s Room” and
to “Speculative
Ruins” an exhibit of the work of artist Maddy
Rosenberg which will be running concurrently at Safe-T-Gallery.
