The Word Is

Opening Saturday 21st June, 6 – 9 pm

Maisonneuve Gallery is pleased to announce the group exhibition 'The Word Is ...', with two American artists represented by Martos Gallery in New York, Bill ALBERTINI and Curtis MITCHELL, and also Jan KOPP. 3 video installations will be presented: Bill Albertini’s McCracken Reel, Jan Kopp’s Die Welt ist alles, was... and Curtis Mitchell’s Godfather.

Bill Albertini's McCracken Reel is a 4-minute silent 16mm film that travels through a 3D computer animated gallery displaying McCracken-like sculptures. The piece is a continuance of Albertini's exploration into memory's parallel universe, its manipulated selectivity and revisionist history. Die Welt ist alles, was... (The world is everything, that...) is a miniature movie theater designed by Jan Kopp. The inside of a varnished wooden box shows images of three children climbing over rocks in the forest. Their voices, speaking in German and sounding like a jingle, recite a few sentences taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. What the artist is trying to do in “Die Welt ist alles, was...” is to compare two ways of manufacturing images of the world. The child’s way, inventing things through play, and the adult’s way, offering an intellectual deconstruction.

Thanks to the Centre Photographique d’Ile de France for its video material. Curtis Mitchell's Godfather is part of the Persona Series.

For this series, the artist has found scenes compelling in his life, scenes he cares to recuperate. 'But someone else has my role and so I empathize, not identify. By using the monochrome as an obliterative tool, the scene can once again become immediate, reflect my history '.

Curtis Mitchell

The Word Is...
Bill Albertini, Jan Kopp, Curtis Mitchell