Washroom
STEREOSCOPIC VIDEO INSTALLATION
Video HD loop 3 min 36 / Wood box Le Fresnoy 2006 Tourcoing, France 2006
Sound Design: Cristian Manzutto
This installation revolves around a bathroom, which is at once a shared site and a place of great intimacy.
This bathroom also hosts an invisible figure that only becomes apparent when in contact with water, only when it washes in this room does it exist, and can see itself, touch itself. This transparent mass will take a shape: that of a naked woman.
She behaves away from the gaze of the outside world. Yet there is a voyeur, the spectator, who sees the scene through a hole in the wall.
The issue of a character in relation to their own intimacy shifts back and forth between the freedom of the other’s gaze and the necessity of coming to terms with one’s own discomfort with respect to the perception of one’s body (complexes, unease, disgust)
Cyclo
INTERACTIVE VIDEO INSTALLATON
Bicycle / HD Vidéo / Electronic Sound / Programmation Max MSP / Wood box-bycicle-metal structure
Arts Bridge Project Okayama Japan 2008
This piece evokes what the change means for me, we are surrounded by a fast growing new technology, certainly is giving us the possibility to have a free and easy access to an open world, even though we are also living in artificial worlds we are constantly observed and revolves also into a certain loneliness.
The spectator is meant to mount the bicycle and to pedal, and invited to see what is inside the box; there the person will be call out by an image of a woman steering at him (or she). That means the spectator will feel at first observed by this woman.
By pedaling the person will activate gradually some changes on the images, the projected woman will have a transformation: from a real person into an unreal character; Is important to say that this changes will be happening with the tempo of the pedaling, that means the spectator will have the felling that she (or he) is making this changes..
The goal is to confrontate the person first with a feeling of being observed, but also the spectator becomes an actor and an observer of this installation when he pedals and sees the changes of the woman that is observing him, then, there is a communication between the real and the artificial persons.
Tlön
VIDEO INSTALLATION
HD Video - Electronic sound / Wood structure
Pépinières Européenes Méduse - La Bande Vidéo. Québec. 2010
This piece confronts the spectator with the interior of an empty house. It works as a box of memories, evoking a certain feeling from the past of ancient residents. Through an oneiric atmosphere, a blurry childhood fantasy may also be suggested.
Inspired by a resource used in some renaissance paintings, a set of mirrors and windows intend to amplify and open the space; allowing the viewer to access different places of the house. The absence of people and certain clues show us that the house has just been abandoned. However, their traces are still there.
This installation questions traditional laws of perspective, and, is the result of a more sensorial approach to space. The use of different scales in a particular manner plays an important role in tricking the gaze of the spectator. The specific treatment of the image will not place him comfortably in a distant position; on the contrary, the viewer suddenly becomes a direct witness of the scene.
Tlön is the result of the time spend at the artistic residency: Méduse (Quebec, Canada), thanks to the support of Conseil des Arts et des lettres du Québec, La Bande Vidéo and L’Oeil de Poisson.
The monkey in the abstract garden
The monkey in the abstract garden
Alexandra Grimal — voice, texts, composition, little stones, pieces of wood, reeds, cymbals, keyboard, pearls, Tibetan bowl, wooden pucks, dried flowers, corn balls, wooden frog
France 2021
Benjamin Levy — electronics
Antonia Fritche — videos
David Simonson — landscape
Céline Grangey — sound engineer
Gilles Clément — texts
coproduction kido, Césaré Centre National de Création Musicale de Reims, scène nationale d'Orléans, tirsis, Centre des Arts Numériques d'Enghien-les-Bains, Scène Conventionnée d’Intérêt National Art & Création, l'ADAMI, la DRAC Île-de-France, la Spedidam, le CNM.
the monkey in the abstract garden is a collaboration between composer and singer Alexandra Grimal, computer music producer Benjamin Lévy, video artist Antonia Fritche and landscape designer David Simonson.
Like a garden where everyone invents their own path, the public can move freely or settle comfortably in the space, the spectator lets himself be carried away by this dreamlike garden, a dialogue between visual and musical spatialization.
to know more about this piece visit the site of Alexandra Grimal
https://www.alexandragrimal.com