Virginie Laganière

POST NATURAL
01.20–02.26.2011
Room 2

Extreme “environments”

CLARK is beginning the year 2011 with two exhibitions that resonate with each other in a surprising manner. Bunk Bed City, an environment by Dean Baldwin, takes up the main room while Virginie Laganière presents the installation Post Natural in the second room. Between Laganière, who has set up an installation inspired by the fact that Switzerland is the country with the most fallout shelters per capita, and Baldwin, who turns the gallery into a space evocative of summer camps with their bunk beds and communal kitchen, an interest for observing humans in “extreme situations” emerges.

Virgine Laganière has taken over the gallery’s small room by installing an abandoned surveillance post reminiscent of the Cold War. Images are displayed on monitors surrounded by technical equipment apparently from another era, and which leaves one wondering whether it functions or not. Here one can observe Swiss bunkers which have been repurposed by their owners and transformed into a family room, wine cellar or exercise space, i.e. “architectures of fear” recycled into living spaces. After going through this first section, one then discovers a landscape made up of a lake encircled by mountains. A layered soundtrack comprised of commentaries gathered on discussion forums where people question the usefulness of having a fallout shelter at home, emanates from this setting. The contrast between the—strangely disquieting— bucolic aspect of the landscape and the tone of the conversations about the fears of citizens, who are ready to face any eventuality, reveals the media’s and authorities’ responsibility in perpetuating a climate one could qualify as social paranoia. Post Natural follows up on a six-month residency the artist carried out in Switzerland, and during which she canvassed defensive architectures dating from World War II. Though the materials which Laganière uses to create her environments result from actual investigations, they are freely arranged in the gallery, and thus trigger imaginary speculations which contribute to highlighting the fact that the real is always marked by fiction, and vice versa.

In combination, the works Post Natural and Bunk Bed City tell a story which goes beyond the confines of their respective worlds. It is as though Bunk Bed City became a fallout shelter reinterpreted by Baldwin as a summer camp dormitory, a place whose construction is driven by considerable anxiety and which now serves as a context for the zany activities dreamed up by a master craftsman of off-kilter humour. Ideally suited for this exercise, Gallery CLARK’s cement rooms make one feel cut off from the world since they have no outward facing windows. Nevertheless, a doubt remains: will we not be observed, or even closely watched?

Anne Marie St-Jean Aubre

trans. Bernard Schutze

SEE www.virginielaganiere.com