At the Salon de Normandy by The Community in Paris, Foreign & Domestic present a solo show with works by Michael Iveson. In this video, we have a look at the installation and speak with Michael Iveson and curator Alex Meurice.
Michael Iveson: mur/ /mur – Foreign & Domestic at Salon de Normandy by The Community. Hotel Normandy, Paris, October 17, 2019.
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Info:
Michael Iveson’s installation ‘mur/ /mur’ extends his investigation into the social division of space, status and luxury.Iveson divides the Petite Salle into two mutually exclusive spaces. Panels of painted bubblewrap stretched onto wooden frames create an awkward ‘service’ or vestibule space connecting the street entrance directly to the main entrance foyer. The other, more desirable, section of the Petite Salle, features richly evocative bubblewrap paintings which reference the design of new furniture installed in the renovated hotel rooms upstairs, and the abstract compositions of luxury adverts. Installed in and around the structure are several of Iveson’s paintings, two recent diptychs of pigment-leached newsprint with recycled pigment application, and a large new wax crayon painting which evokes the elaborate form of an English stately home’s hedgerows, both decorative barrier and status marker. A semicircular barrier of sandbags hinders access from the Grande Salle into the Petite Salle. The full circle of sandbags is completed in its reflection in the mirrored doorways, thus highlighting the intimate relation between imaginary and physical barriers. ‘mur/ /mur’ divides the exhibition space into high-status and low-status zones, each of which can be observed only roughly through the painted bubblewrap barrier, and plays with visibility, obstruction and access. The title of the work, mur/ /mur, is an aural and visual pun on the English word ‘murmur’ and the French word for wall, mur.
About Foreign & Domestic:
Foreign & Domestic is an itinerant curatorial project focused on supporting site-sensitive and timely interventions by contemporary artists, with an emphasis on collectivity, international and interdisciplinary exchange. Foreign & Domestic grows out the exhibitions and projects curated by Slate Projects at the Averard Hotel in London in the period 2016-18. Salon de Normandy is the first project by Foreign & Domestic.
About Michael Iveson:
Michael Iveson (b. 1984, Northern Ireland) is a painter, printmaker and installation artist based in London. Through his work, Iveson questions the creation and maintenance of social divisions, the interplay between the abstract space of advertising, fear and desire and their concrete manifestations through status, consumption and the lived environment.
