http://artpost.info/postcafe/right.asp?client_id=1071Lani Maestro: "Je suis toi"
7/31/2006
photoImages
Lani Maestro, "Je suis toi," 2006.
Caen, France, summer 2006.
Lani Maestro's installation "Je suis toi" is simultaneously grounded and suspended within the architecture of the Eglise St. Nicholas in Caen, France. Consistent with her long history of work, this installation utilizes simple material and structural vocabulary to impart a complex contextual reference.
Multitudinous benches fill the floor of the 18th century church. Each is unique and cobbled together from recycled, found wooden remnants sourced from the local area. The benches play a curious role in the former church by simultaneously fulfilling and subverting an expected function. The immediate associations with pews are complicated by the benches' quirkiness and invasive placement. Together, they cover the entire floor plan of the architecture. This tidal flow of benches sets in motion a democratization of all the hierarchical spaces, be it corners, nave or chancel. There is also reference to localized community, extended to a global level. Benches are commonly used in rural and familial gatherings not only in Normandy, where Maestro now resides for most of the year, but also in other cultures such as the Philippines where she grew up.
Visitors are compelled to participate in a performative function by interacting with the work. As they make their way among the diverse benches, they must weave a slow and non-linear path to traverse from one end of the building to the other. As well, the urge to try out the benches by sitting or perching or squatting is too inviting to resist. By settling themselves down, visitors are given a very different perspective on the work, negotiating ergonomics, shifting their bodies' relationship to the space and altering their sightline.
Lani Maestro states of the work: "... the sea of benches soothes the space with its horizontality. Simultaneous with the occidental verticality of Christian soaring to the heavens, this insistence becomes a grounding to earth, a rootedness that remains modest, invisible almost, but intentional. The benches' utilitarian function is disrupted for an experience of 'purposeful purposelessness.' In art as in the conventions of church architecture, the viewer is set up for spectatorship. My work denies us this as a way of reclaiming subjectivity and proposes a meditative act of simply being. Emptied now of the ritual components of religion, the space embodies certain aspects of introspection as the architecture converses with the divine through light, air, silence. It is this silence precisely that unravels the (our) difference in void, emptiness. The work offers nothing, and this is its challenge."
The exhibition is presented by Centre d'art contemporain de Basse-Normandie and is on view throughout the summer of 2006.
