Philippe Hamelin: Routine 422

Exhibition

August 21 – September 27, 2003

Project Description

Everyday life often asks us to make little or big leaps into the unknown. Whether it be a new project, a new romantic relationship or a new job, many situations destabilize us and we turn somersaults without even knowing what will happen. In the video that he is presenting in Skol’s small gallery, Philippe Hamelin deals with this theme through a gymnast’s routine. The gymnast is hesitant and reluctant at first, but nonetheless willing to take the risk of letting herself fall. From this point on, the video’s specificities dictate the moves of this woman who becomes a prisoner of the television screen and of the fast and dizzying editing.

One cannot ignore the references to Formalism and Conceptual Art in this emerging artist’s work. He is interested in the representation of the human body, where the energy of the figure is combined with the video’s formal properties. In this merging of the body and the limits of its representation, we see not only a formal construction, but also the theatre of our relationship to the world around us and how sometimes it restrains us.