Jeanne Briand at Super Dakota / Brussels, Belgium

Jeanne
Briand / Prox•im•i•ty

11
January - 24 February 2018

Super
Dakota

45
Rue Washington

1050
Brussels

Interweaving
materials, molecules and affects, Jeanne Briand’s research embodies
the texture of an imaginary world where the invention progresses by
successive improvements of a system that is never given, so much as
reprogrammed. 

Focusing
on the echelon of the subject inserted into a certain environment,
the artist models forms achieved as much through the
customization of one strand of DNA as through one archaic mutant
ornament.  Prox•im•i•ty, her exhibition at Super Dakota,
combines two series from of a new cycle of productions initiated in
California as wells as in India during a residency in Bombay last
spring. 

In
the densely populated city, the artist notices the protection guards
which systematically wrap up the bodies of motorcycles. 

Custom
made, these structures serve as much to protect the bikes from
potential impacts as to keep others at bay : together ornament and
prothesis, they swaddle the hot rods like a steel exoskeleton. 
Displayed on the floor or on the wall, the body initially augmented
disappears completely, raising the accessory to the status of
substance. 

Detached
and transformed, these structures become independent while keeping
alive the memory of an absent body.  From counter-shape they grow into
a form, and wrapped in leather by the artist, they transform into a
simulacrum of organism – becoming a technobody of the Proximity
Max* series. 

The
second series presented by Jeanne Briand, Chromo Turbo, embodies the
interdependency of the ways of making : the mechanical extensions,
tools, bikes, ornaments or prothesis oriented towards the external
environment ; but also the genetic program, which thanks to the
progress in science, also appears controllable and reconfigurable at
leisure.  Jeanne went to Los Angeles to develop this project in custom
garages, the pieces, arising from the observation of motorcycle and
car restoration workshops, reconnect with the genetic aspect of her
early works.  These pieces, started before entering Les Beaux-Arts de
Paris, with the Random Control series (2010-2015), were shaped
uteruses in blown glass were ,made from the test tubes of
rese­arch-laboratories. 

This
corpus will then evolve into the Gamete Glass (2015-2017), an opera
of genetic glass where glass gametes generate sounds enabled by the
very own breath that created them. 

Prox•im•i•ty
offers through these two new series, an extension of the field of
manipulation.  Therefore, in the Chromo Turbo works,
the pairs of handlebars assembled two by two and coated with colored
leather make up genetic sequences of chromo­somes.  From the same
residency in Los Angeles, Jeanne Briand shows modified gas tanks
resembling ready-made protheses, as well as a series of masks –
inspired by primitive artefacts – and designed from body armours. 
Alternating between the microscopic scale of genetic and the
macroscopic of social apparatus, the artist unveils how virtuality
and reality are inextri­cably bound by their infinite
re-programming.  Finally the photographs respectively displaying a
detail which triggered the two production cycles, in Bombay and Los
Angeles, are witnesses in their own way that every details, even if
anecdotic, can switch through small operations – syntheses, build
up, decontextualisation – to a fantasy of a near futur, already
contained, seeding inside every fold of reality.  You just have to
come and activate it.