Lili Reynaud-Dewar, «Live through that ?!», at the New Museum, New York, USA.
For her first solo museum presentation in the United States, Lili Reynaud-Dewar has created a new body of site-specific works.
Lili Reynaud-Dewar creates environments and situations in which the
body is often present, expressing vulnerability and empowerment and
collapsing public and private space. Her works evolve through a range of
mediums such as performance, video, installation, sound, and
literature, as demonstrated by the series of exhibitions and projects
realized under the titles “Why Should Our Bodies End At The Skin” (2012)
and “I Am Intact And I Don’t Care” (2013). For Reynaud-Dewar, the
relationship between exposure and camouflage enables her to challenge
established conventions relating to the body, sexuality, power
relations, and institutional spaces.
Recently her installations have recreated domestic environments,
such as in her series of bedrooms produced over the past year in which
beds are transformed into sound sculptures through the insertion of
speakers. At the New Museum, “Live Through That?!,” her first solo
museum presentation in the United States, will feature a new
installation in this series. For this exhibition, Reynaud-Dewar has
created, among other works, four site-specific videos shot on each floor
of the Museum in which she moves and dances alone through the building,
camouflaging herself in the empty gallery spaces during the transition
period between exhibitions. Playing with notions of intimacy and
exposure, Reynaud-Dewar pays homage to a series of works by Bruce Nauman
titled Art Make-Up (1967–68) in which the artist covers his
body with layers of makeup, first white, then pink, then green, and
finally black—the same four colors Reynaud-Dewar uses to cover her body
as she performs on each of the Museum’s four floors.
Reynaud-Dewar’s videos will be installed in the Museum’s Lobby
Gallery alongside her most recent bed sculptures and surrounded by
curtains covering the gallery walls. Adopting the same four color
palette and partly dipped in black ink, the curtains are inscribed with
excerpts from the French writer Guillaume Dustan’s 1996 book In My Room.
Reynaud-Dewar has also worked with musician and composer Macon to
create a soundtrack, installed as part of her bed sculptures, that
incorporates her reading aloud from Dustan’s provocative, sexually
explicit narrative. As with the literal exposure of her own body—naked
save for the makeup—literature and the written word’s ability to mediate
personal and intimate experiences play an important role both in this
exhibition and in Reynaud-Dewar ongoing body of work.
