8 January 2016
For her first solo exhibition in Paris, Felicia Atkinson is sharing on ongoing project called “Une forêt se pétrifie“ (A forest petrifies), opening it first act, here, at Rinomina.
On a serie of tables some auto-reverse cassette players endlessly play 40 m mn tapes.
It loops a reading the artist has made of the first part of the manuscript of a novel in progress she is currently writing and that is divided into several parts called “Une forêt se pétrifie“.
Each of these tapes has a part - or a chapter - of this text. Amplified and displayed in the room,the installation recompose this novel Atkinson is writing.
Those recordings are made at different places and gather Felicia’s voice while reading with diffe- rent sounds of what surrounds her at that very moments, as well as some minimal electronic music composition intertwined in it. This novel has an ambiguous function, it is in a sense an orphan, itis not part of the literary world (it is unfinished and unpublished, this might be even a’bad’novel)neither it is a sculpture ... Obviously it’s this latent status , this limbo state that Felicia Atkinson pro-poses, as a palimpsest to share ... In the petrified forest in Arizona, plants have become mineral. Some say it’s bad luck to steal them. Many people who had stolen fragments of the petrified foresthave returned them to the park after experiencing strange or disturbing adventures.
At Rinomina, the viewer is invited to share those snippets of a metaphorical petrified forest, butalso to play with his doubts: is this a « real novel », what about the dice on stone hand? what is the status of this small painting?
In the room the visitor’s mind can wander while hearing this strange audio book and looking at a painting, a digital collages on aluminium, a sealed box containing a secret story, the very imageof a possible flower in the desert, some ceramics and diverse objects...
Temporality comes therefore into play, suggested by the time, the sound, a similar experience to that one of the concert or the performance and other «readymade ceremonies“ that Atkinsons tends to cherish and share....
Félicia Atkinson (born 1981 in Paris) has graduated with honors from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and studied anthropology and contemporary dance (BOCAL project with Boris Charmatz in 2003). She is a visual artist, an experimental musician and the co-publisher of the independent imprint Shelter Press/curatorial platform Argument with Bartolomé Sanson.
Her works deal with the topics of improvisation, fiction, instant composition, noise, abstractionand poetry. Her paintings, drawings, sculpture, texts, installations, performances, and musical compositions are mostly abstract and fed by multiples expeditions to places such as Rio de Ja- neiro, Brittany and most often the american west, where she collects sounds, objects and diverse material for her work.
www.feliciaatkinson.com
With: Felicia Atkinson