Galerie Dix9 – Hélène Lacharmoise from Paris presents Oddity with Sophia Pompéry and Marion Tampon-Lajarriette.
Oddity, title inspired by David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity”, refers to the bizarre, the strange.
The selected photo and video works express this strangeness that run through the investigations of those two emerging European artists. They question the memory that affects our perception of the world.
Observing what barely can be seen, Sophia Pompery plays with physical laws, viewing patterns and personal expectations as the gesture of painting with water on a table surface, revealing a framed second image ( Still water) the shadowless flame of a candle (Light Shadow) or a candle burning upside and down (Lighting up Burning down). Like a film, the photographic series Passage is showing seven moments of an ephemeral view taken through the window on a ferry when another boat was passing by.
Pursuing the artist exploration of the image and its haunting power over reality, the series MoCLT by Marion Tampon-Lajarriette are strange images captured in the flow of infrared cameras that filmed a visit by night at the Mamco in Geneva : ambiguous traces related to a time of darkness, the failure of the visible and the significance of ghosts in the collective imagination.
Two antagonistic movements, of involvement and distance, are constantly mixing in the psychic space of each Viewer as well as in the video series Antichthones where the characters are trapped in rear film settings. The illusion of a continuous space mirrors the polarity that exists between the contradictory worlds of reality and fiction.
Sophia Pompéry (* Berlin 1984) produces video works, photos and objects that derive from her interest in everyday objects and physical phenomena. Minimalistic in the choice of material Pompery’s conceptual works are motivated by a desire to slow down the sense of time. Their poetical ephemera leads the viewer into a state of contemplation.
Questioning normality, everyday life objects reveal their mystery. Sometimes the artist uses tricks to make the assumed impossible become truth, for example by making a candle burn from each side with the help of a vacuum cleaner. (lighting up burning down). Pompery avoids picture editing or special effects. Instead she plays with physical phenomena and with our visual perception, trapping the viewer without denying reality, as in “Plopp Plopp” where a projection on a bath tub creates the illusion of drops of milk coming from the tub.
Marion Tampon-Lajarriette (* Paris 1984)
Using digital tools, Marion Tampon-Lajariette explores the image and its links with memory and dream. Questioning the process and the components of the image, the artist works on pre existing documents ( cinema, video, press, Internet..) to create new charts and point out the means by which images are haunting our relationship to reality.
