“ARMORS” JEANNE VICERIAL
“This army of presences stand tall, displaying their scars of sutured threads. Clad in their ‘armors’, they march proudly into the future, charting a history of femininity.”
JANUARY 7 - MARCH 11, 2023
PARIS - GRENIER SAINT LAZARE
Galerie Templon will be starting 2023 decked in Jeanne Vicerial’s ebony black and white. For her very first gallery show in Paris, the artist is unveiling fifteen new textile sculptures in various formats.
The first person in France to be awarded a PhD in practice-based fashion design, in 2019, and artist-in-residence at the prestigious Villa Medici in 2020, at 31 Jeanne Vicerial has already garnered widespread recognition for her avant-garde approach.
She used her research to overthrow textile industry codes, questioning the made-to-measure/ready-to-wear dichotomy. Her practice then shifted focus onto the place of women and the female body in society, regularly involving artists such as set designers, perfumers, and musicians in her projects.
This new exhibition sees Jeanne Vicerial appropriating the space with her silent army of figures crystalised over time. An avid reader of poetry, she breathes life into these “Armors”, her disturbing warrior women clad in love (“amour”) as well as armour (“armure”), covering the mannequins entirely in black thread. At the heart of the exhibition an imposing articulated robot, controlled by a software program, dances around a sculpture, weaving a web to capture it with a succession of delicate, endlessly repeated movements. This creative process seems to have spawned various “presences”, recumbent women lying on their tombstones in a darkened basement that has become a crypt, mysterious hybrid figures, the very stuff of mythology.
The pilgrimage moves to a different stage with a cabinet of curiosities dedicated to “sex-votos”. The artist covers the spotlessly white walls with an accumulation of objects-as-offerings. As she explains: “It’s interesting to note the parallels between the textile industry and the world of sculpture: both fields use the term ‘seams’ for the junction points, the places where parts interlink.” Mangled or dismembered, these flowering vulvas, tiny vestimentary organs and Venus bellies seem to look for their bearings. With these curious ceremonial objects, Jeanne Vicerial dives deeper into her exploration of the contemporary place of gender and the female body, turn in turn worshiped and abused over thousands of years.