Aurélie Blanchette Dubois / Who Framed Perpetual Bliss?
April 30 - June 19, 2021
MALA
Rua Dom João de Castro 35A
Lisboa
Mala is happy to present Who Framed Perpetual Bliss?, the first exhibition in Portugal by Canadian artist Aurélie Blanchette Dubois.
The exhibitions brings together her recent film What Exceeds (2020) and a series of new textile sculptures, Conforama Balling (2021) and Meltdown Birthing (2021), produced specifically for Mala’s exhibition space.
What Exceeds is a short fiction film shown on a vertical screen where is observed a group of young adults operating a shift in their existential quest – a sort of strategic withdrawal that consist of acting in a simulacrum of professionalism. Recognizing the inherent demands of power and negotiation dynamics to defend themselves or to exercise any form of resistance, they create their community and engage in an electrical wiring practice. Flirting with the aesthetic codes of the fashion and music industry, the video and the sculptures evoke the impression of a schizophrenic state between sincerity and cynicism as the simultaneous imperatives of mainstream popular culture.
The installation of the textile pieces together with the hanging lights fixtures expand the imaginary of the film into materials. Made from a digital collage of stock images and fictitious newspaper clips printed on mesh fabric, the curtain and the soft balls scattered in the space are reminiscent of a showroom or a vacant playground. The pattern combines images of body parts with others of sewers, spilling canales and garden hoses arranged in ornamental compositions. There is a tone of nostalgia to the fashion and ideological trend displayed in the objects, a suggestion of a bygone era of future-oriented interior decoration as a class achievement.
Aurélie Blanchette Dubois is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist who lives and works at Geneva, Switzerland. Her artistic practice brings together different forms, including painting, video, writing, textiles and furniture guided by an interest in the dynamics regulating individual and collective human determinations, as well as those influenced by aesthetics and the institution of good taste in fashion, advertising and politics.
After obtaining a Bachelor in Visual Arts from Concordia University in Montreal in 2013, she joined the Master in Visual Arts, Work.Master orientation, at HEAD - Geneva where she graduated in 2019. Her work has been awarded within the framework of various scholarships and art prizes such as the Leslie and Kaye Jowett Excellence Scholarship (Montreal), the HES Excellence Award 2019 from HEAD -Geneva or the Bourses Déliées from the FCAC (Geneva). Recently her work has been presented in exhibitions such as Lemaniana, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève (2021), NOEXIT, with Fraich Club, espace3353, Zabriskie Point and Duplex, Geneva (2021); L’élément contingent, LiveInYourHead, Geneva (2018) and Spirale Dynamique, Hors Lit # 3, Bern (2017).