Sorcha Dallas

LEGEND From May 25 Through September 28, 2008 In the Chateau and the Outbuildings Domaine départemental de Chamarande, France Opening Sunday May 25, 3 PM

A Voodoo-cannibal marker, a jean cut out on a tree’s crotch, a magician handling several millennia’s human production in a few minutes, sticks made of salt crystals fallen to Earth, a tiny clock engine, the maggot’s house, a hunting lodge haunted by Guerlain … welcome to LEGEND: a summer exhibition curated by Alexis Vaillant for the Domaine départemental de Chamarande, owned by the Essone general Council, open to visitors between May 26 through September 28, 2008.

Over one hundred works by forty-seven artists are gathered together in the castle and in the outbuildings (chapel, ice-house, park, belvedere) on this occasion. We find among other things, a soap bubble programmed to last forever, five chewing gum tablets enclosed inside a tongue-piercing, a golf club for amateurs, a gloved Asian priestess levitating, a spider made of strawberry-chocolate, a black swan, sculptures made of duvet, a crystallized werewolf’s head, Ian Curtis’ white jean jacket, Jack Nicholson above the cuckoo’s nest, and many other visual short-cuts.

Our time is marked by speeding up, and finds itself deep inside a continuous present, imposed and guaranteed by media frenzy. At the same time, that present exists only via the imagined future, without which one could not even see/imagine it.

The heap of wannabe communicative – archives that has been thrown up during the last decade is hardly useable, and history – our history – will therefore be difficult to write. We would in fact be about to pass inside the realm of legend. It is chiefly based on that assumption that the exhibition takes place.

To do so, the castle is plunged into total darkness. All the windows are covered in mirrors. All the windows are covered in mirrors. The countless viewpoints are transmitted by made-to-measure lighting, whose layout was designed by Yves Godin. To enter the castle is to leave it. What remains visible of the inside architecture is henceforth played out in black and white; the when works alone direct the exhibition spaces.

Each room is introduced by a haiku, a Japanese type of poem, the briefest in the world. And so the visual haikus thus created produce the largest possible floating space inside a minimalist immediacy, a floating, aware of every kind of coincidence. Why? Because legends are everywhere.