Back for P.3

Camille Henrot and Hew Locke , respectively featured at the New Orleans Museum of Art and at the Pérez Art Museum Miami are back to the USA for Prospect.3.


Camille Henrot


Camille Henrot is a French multimedia artist living in New York and Paris. Born in 1978, she graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and was noticed in 2005 after an exhibition at the Cartier Foundation.
A prolific multi-disciplinary artist, known for her video clips, her work includes sculptures, drawings, photographs and displays on computers through which she translates her fascination with symbols of the past, myths which she reinterprets for a modern time.
She combines anthropology, philosophy, literature, history in her multicultural view of the world.
She participated to the Paris Triennale and was recently awarded the "Silver Lion" at the Venice Biennale with her video Grosse Fatigue.

The New Orleans Museum of Art presented her fist solo exhibition in the United States with Cities of Ys at the end of 2013.

Her work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Chisenhale Gallery in London, the Centre Pompidou, the Louvre, the Musée d’Art Moderne, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, and the New Museum in New York. In 2013, she was the recipient of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington, DC, where she produced the video Grosse Fatigue awarded by the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Camille Henrot currently has a solo exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, which will travel to Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris and the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster. She is nominated for the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize. Camille Henrot is represented by kamel mennour, Paris; Johann König, Berlin; and Metro Pictures, New York. 

Hew Locke

Hew Locke was born in 1959 in Edinburgh to a British mother and a Guyanese father, both of them artists. Locke lived in Scotland until 1966 when the family moved by boat to Guyana, a former British colony on the Caribbean coast of South America. He earned a B.A. in fine art from Falmouth School of Art and Design (now Falmouth University) in 1988 and a M.A. in sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 1994. He currently lives and works in London. Through a wide range of media including painting, drawing, photography, relief, fabric, sculpture, casting, found objects and collage, Locke developed his practice which  first was misread as folk art and has now reached its full impact. Through his works, Locke tackles diverse subjects like globalization, colonization, immigration, power, trade, architecture, history. His ambivalent relationship with the British monarchy is treated with humor in House of Windsor, ultimately engaging in a reflection about power.    
Despite the variety of materials he employs, Locke regards all of his art as interconnected—“like DNA,” he explains, “it loops and twists around.”
His recent installation For Those in Peril on the Sea, (2011) at the Perez Art Museum Miami reflected the longstanding place of boats in Locke’s iconography.

Selected shows include  National Portrait Gallery (London), El Museo de Bario (New York),  Fondation Clément (Martinique), The Bell House (Prague), Kunsthal KAdE (Netherlands), Tate Britain (London), V&A Museum (London), The New Art Gallery (Walsall), Rivington Place (London), The Bluecoat Gallery (Liverpool), The British Museum (London), The New Art Exchange (Nottingham), The Luckman Gallery (LA), The New York Museum of Art and Design (New York), Atlanta Contemporary Arts (US) and at The Brooklyn Museum (New York).  In 2010 Locke's work, Sikandar, was shortlisted for the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square (London).

Locke's work is represented in many collections including The Government Art Collection (UK), Miami Art Museum (US), The Tate Gallery (UK), The Arts Council of England (UK), The Collection of Eileen and Peter Norton (US), The Brooklyn Museum (New York), The Arnold Lehman Collection (US), The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (US), Kansas City Collection (US), The RSID Museum (Rhode Island), The New Art Gallery (Walsall), The Victoria & Albert Museum Drawing Collection (London), The British Museum (London) and The Henry Moore Institute (Leeds).

Meet the artist at Tate
represented by Hales Gallery


photographs by the author

 Detail of the installation "The Descendants of Pirogue", 2013, from Camille Henrot at the NOMA
Detail of the installation " For Those in Peril on the Sea", 2011, from Hew Locke at the Pérez Museum of Art Miami

From Folktales to Indians

With her background, Camille Henrot, a French artist living in New York, is most qualified to look for a lost tribe of Houma Indians diluted between water and land in the most Southern part of Louisiana. A sort of ethnographer, philosopher, historian, who graduated from the famous Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs, her interest in different cultures and her research in primitive myths fit with the subject of her first solo exhibition in the United States, Cities of Ys at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Through her installation which includes a series of videos, she captures the life of the Houma people and looks into their ancestry, heavily influenced by the French, from their language to their last name. She describes a community, busy with church meetings, celebrations or school gatherings. Individuals share their photographs on cell phones and oral traditions are taken over by visual recordings which have become the repository of their memories. Adapting to a new world, their occupations have shifted from fishing to working for the oil companies, like building pipes for use on the oil rigs, an unavoidable collaboration for survival. The Houma Indians now disseminated in six different parishes were identified by Cavelier de La Salle in 1682 and recognized by the State of Louisiana but need to fulfill seven criteria in order to meet the definition of a tribe and receive subsidies from the federal government.
The awareness to the Houma tribe brought up by this exhibition is only one of the artist's goal. She presents the videos with a twist by modifying the shape of the screen with different "frames". The set up includes also a pile of paper printed with excerpts of old French Ballads from Brittany, a screenshot of a Wikipedia page with the word "Cappuccino", a late Klee-like painting, a photograph of an eagle or a paint color swatch with shades of red... These sideshows blended around the videos require some interpretation by the viewer. However their symbolism may be lost due to the visual overload. Loosing the thread, the visitor may miss a great view of an offshore oil platform reflected in the sunglasses of a local story-teller or children playing under water followed by a shot of the oil sheen lurking on the surface, picture of a loss of innocence. How  eight silkscreen prints drawn from the imprint of pieces of wood leftover from guitar making relate to the cities of Ys? In Horse with No Name, the artist defines her vision of America, the guitar becomes a symbol of the land.
The transition to the next exhibition, Woven Histories: Houma Basketry, about the long tradition of basket weaving in the Houma Indians is very relevant. A half canoe (or pirogue) on each side of the wall separating the two exhibitions. On one side, the front of the canoe, simple and efficient, on the other side, the back loaded with symbols, the mother pirogue with smaller pirogues and a ceramic ball representing the earth, created from the gathering of mud by a crawfish according to a myth from the Houma tribe.
Going back to the French myth which gave the title to the exhibition, the end of the tale is dramatic. The city of Ys is swallowed by the ocean.
Water, the element binds a mythical city and an Indian tribe trying to rediscover its roots in a shrinking land.

photographs by the author:

detail "Plasmas plasma stealth", 2013
detail "The Descendants of Pirogue", 2013