03/09/2014
Closing party of the Jeanne Susplugas: House to House II show tomorrow at Pioneer Works coinciding with a THREE-FOLD LAUNCH PARTY CELEBRATING
IN*******SE Magazine, Issue 2
Productions + ARTonAir Radio Studio
SECOND SUNDAYS Series: Open Studios + Live music
Don't miss it ;-)
Fragmental Museum and Pioneer Works were pleased to present House to House II, an exhibition of work by Jeanne Susplugas that furthers and deepens the artist’s investigation into the human condition and its psychological, physical, and behavioral excesses. In House to House II, Jeanne Susplugas delves into the concept of home: its representation, its functional and emotional significance, and its impact on the individual. In the collective imagination, the house is the primary shelter for the body, its loved ones, and its possessions. The house is a home: the site of intimacy, of treasures, memories, secrets, and unspoken words. In exploring the tension between the house as a protective space and the house as an alienating space, the artist demonstrates the binary nature of our relationship with home, and uncovers the blurred and shady spaces of our daily existence.
Adages and proverbs tied to the domestic space run rampant. But Jeanne Susplugas manages to overthrow the customary platitudes. House to House II investigates questions of mobility, relocation, and their subsequent traumas—separation, uprooting, adaptation, and novelty—in asking individuals to list the objects they would save in an emergency. What do we store in our wardrobes, our suitcases, and drawers? How do we fill a home?
And is it a house or a prison? In the video There’s No Place Like Home, Jeanne Susplugas exposes the alienating character of home. A woman incants the title’s emblematic phrase over and over in an effort to convince both herself and the public of this universal (counter-) truth. We are reminded that being home does not always mean being safe, or being well. Home can be suffocating, can be sick.
In her video Iatrgoène, Jeanne Susplugas delves into our medical consumption, our addictions, our needs, and our treatments. Iatrgoène takes the form of a conversation among friends in a Parisian café. The three actors chat about the desired and undesired effects of the drugs that have infiltrated our lives: medicines that serve both as medical necessity and as psychological crutch. Our bathrooms fill up with the boxes, bottles, and syringes that hold the chemical answer to our sicknesses, anxieties, and depressions. The artist empties such containers of their functional contents and removes their names, transforming them into precious ceramic objects. Thus they become a part of our literary vocabulary as in F. Beigbeder’s phrase: “So then you go home, medicate, and cease to dream.” Tranquilizers become commonplace, entering our speech, our homes, our bodies.
And so, thus invaded, we move forward through our intimate and social worlds, each to his own, masked, armed, impoverished, strong, and vulnerable.
Jeanne Susplugas displaces the habitual, and pulls out that which is habitually concealed behind four walls.
