UNBOXING#2
_Louise Mervelet

For UNBOXING #2, Louise Mervelet presents a series of fetish objects that are housed in the artist’s living space, generating a surreal cabinet of curiosities. Each image-photograph is a field scattered with clues, in which the work plays its role alongside everyday life. Lamps, fabric, foliage, chemicals, concrete, and drawers are the scenographic elements that transform the tangible into an alchemical space.

The object is an icon for its universal readability following the stratification of narratives and representations that have fixed its meaning.

 

Louise Mervelet appropriates, discharges and materialises these archetypes. Coffins, roses, masks or medallions take shape as artworks, through the use of a variety of materials and disparate media: acrylic, plaster, silicone, chocolate or resin. Between fabula and video games, the artist connects the imaginary, the virtual and the ordinary by opening up new interpretations off the beaten track.

This magma of stereotypes, plastics and colours also contains an ironic, erotic and subversive force. The same force that drives us to question the meaning of the image-symbol, to desecrate it, to change the function and role of the character or the sequence of events that the narration imposes. The object-talisman, embedded in the real, serves as a passage towards another dimension. It is the password, the key, the inert deconstruction tool to access the next level.

 

Thus, for the card-work Scopa Sorceres - as Louise Mervelet says – “The witch imprisoned in her resin is an invented figure, a scopa knight-ress, in reference to the Italian card game which does not have female figures.” The witch appears to us transparently, redoubled, in an overlap of lines and identities: woman, knight, seer. Aquarius, a jar/bowl, placed like a crystal ball on a glittering carpet, contains a treasure, a potion, a repressed desire. Looking For Trouble is the coffin waiting to be desecrated.

These objects are perhaps the amulets of a story that unfolds around us and of which we are unconsciously part. Touching them, appropriating them, to - in thought - plunge into their resin, scrape off their siliconised frost, ride with the witch or wear the Medallions like an ornament.

 

In parallel, Louise Mervelet’s action-piece is also broadcast audibly in UNBOXING#2, during an animated streaming session on the independent radio station TIKKA. The soundtrack translates - in a purely immaterial form - the alchemy of the elements, decadence and diversity, of its pre/opposition.

On the site, the chapter UNBOXING #2 _Louise Mervelet evokes a secondary quest, from myth to virtual adventure. A parallel path that makes it possible to prolong the life of the player through the appropriation of certain objects, to enter into another story, to connect with another world, to introduce characters, to rediscover a place that we believe is known.

Since research is always multiple, so are its objectives and destinations.

 

(AD + OdN, trad. JP)

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photo credits : Alexandre Gradt