Nick Mauss and Amy Sillman exhbition: Plages

Plages brings together artists that meditate on the place of the subject in the marking of a space. The works explore different vision instruments through which we approach everyday objects, and therefore our distance towards them, as well as the opposition between private space and exhibition space through premeditated patterns that discuss the idea of functionality. Besides its usual translation as beach, the French term Plage is a broad notion that indicates the perimeter of a space, a time lapse or the latitude between two elements - in this case public/private, home/business, decorative/functional.

By pointing out the history of object production and everyday material culture, artists such as Sarah Charlesworth, Monika Baer, Nathalie du Pasquier, Amy Sillman, Louise Lawler, Marisa Merz and Isabelle Cornaro reframe overlooked, ordinary objects and question their purpose as consumption, design, or admiration while setting a new distance between subject and object, foreground and background, as in the site-specific, reflective work of Liz Deschenes. The displacement of domestic objects often takes the form of a renewed artistic appropriation.

The continuity between a domestic space and the exhibition space can also be addressed through the emancipation of design from taste limitations and functional demands. By radicalizing design-based techniques, the work of artists like Nick Mauss, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, and Willem de Rooij can channel multiple painting traditions and reveal collaborative processes. Cheyney Thompson’s interpretation and intentional distortion of reproductive techniques can take the shape of repetitive patterns that delineate the exhibition area in a suite of canvases.