Dominique Petitgand
Il Y A Les Nuages Qui Avancent (There Are Clouds Moving In)
22 Mar - 21 Jun 2015
Dominique Petitgand, view of the sound installation
Proche, très proche, 2006/2013, International Centre for
Art and Landscape, 2013. Sound installation for five
loudspeakers © Aurélien Mole
Proche, très proche, 2006/2013, International Centre for
Art and Landscape, 2013. Sound installation for five
loudspeakers © Aurélien Mole
DOMINIQUE PETITGAND
Il Y A Les Nuages Qui Avancent (There Are Clouds Moving In)
22 March – 21 June 2015
For its first exhibition of the year the International Centre for Art and Landscape is presenting a solo show by Dominique Petitgand, a major figure on the French contemporary art scene. There Are Clouds Moving In brings
together five sound installations – some of them premiering here – and two textworks in the art centre’s spaces and the Sculpture Wood. This event is an invitation to a new (re)discovery of the art centre, as voices, noise, words, silences and musical ambiences reverberate within its walls and set up invisible links.
As part of the Acting in This Landscape group show here in 2013 Dominique Petitgand offered the sound installation Proche, très proche (Close, Very Close, 2006/2013), which was the starting point for this solo exhibition. Petitgand likes to describe his works as narratives, as mental landscapes. He fashions his installations out of recordings of words, respiration, noises, and music, which he composes, puts to work, deconstructs and cuts up. His work explores language as sound, the human voice and the noises produced by the body and a handful of objects. These creations are non-material: their formulation is determined by their locations, contexts and media, all of whose characteristics they must take into account. They call for visitors in movement constructing their own listening practice and sound mix in the course of a spatial and mental journey.
Here Petitgand has adapted to the specific qualities and the architectural and acoustic possibilities of each space at the art centre: height, width, resonance, and closedness or openness towards the outside, with the sonority of each room playing a dominant part. The exhibition trail begins in the Lighthouse with the first installation, Les liens invisibles (The Invisible Links, 2013), which sets up at a distance a dialogue between a voice and sounds. We then continue into the Nave and the electric vibrations of De l’électricité dans l’air (Electricity in the Air, 2015). In the silences inbetween we detect wordless voices – coming from the Study Room – that create a link, a continuity between the rooms and between the works themselves. The exhibition title There Are Clouds Moving In is indirectly inspired by Il y a, ensuite (There is, later, 1994), on show in the Little Theatre. In this work a little girl describes a real or invented landscape she is contemplating from above, an account directly
echoed by the fact that the room gives onto Vassivière Lake, its dam and its surroundings.
The outdoor installation Je siffle au bord du quai (I’m Whistling on the Edge of the Platform, 2011/2013) is to be found in the Sculpture Wood. It inhabits the seeming tranquillity of the forest in the form of a recorded whistling broken by brief, deafening interruptions from a high-speed train.
The non-material nature of Petitgand’s work means it can be shown in very different settings and contexts. «But the central locus is art, because the world of art is the point where orphan practices, singular and with no stable status, come together.» (Dominique Petitgand, Installations (documents), 2009, Éditions MF.
In the Lighthouse at the art centre Dominique Petitgand is presenting the sound installation Les liens invisibles (Invisible Links, 2013), a variation on Proche, très proche (Close, Very Close), shown here in 2013. The first step in the exhibition, this work for five loudspeakers comes in two segments as a synchronous linking of two distinct, separated planes: sounds, then a voice. In the bottom of the lighthouse four speakers emit a series of noises «reminiscent of micro-manipulations of glass objects». As the visitor begins to climb the spiral staircase an increasingly loud voice is heard. At the top a fifth speaker is set up in front of the exit, from which one has a 360° view out over the Vassivière Island landscape. Accompanied by the noises being broadcast downstairs, the voice emerging from this speaker becomes clearer and delivers a narrative; one excerpt reads, «She’s saying a lot of things, she just says things that are, she says you can’t justify them, it’s as if they were invisible links...».
In the Nave we find the new work De l’électricité dans l’air (Electricity in the Air, 2015), a dozen loudspeakers set on the floor. In this high, resonant space sounds of electricity, impacts, splittings and vibrations intrude in fits and starts. In the intervening silences you also pick up wordless voices – calling, crying out, singing – coming from four loudspeakers on the walls of the Study Room: «A tattered, airy, gravity-free presence seemingly engaged in a secret relationship with the sounds from the Nave.»
At two points in the exhibition we come upon video screens «showing a series of short sentences in white letters on a black ground, passing in a mute, irregular, musical tempo. Also to be read in fragments, this written material adds a further layer to the exhibition trail’s sound strata, like low-key interference or a commentary or an extra, open window.»
In the Little Theatre is the work that gave its title to Petitgand’s exhibition Il y a, ensuite (There is, later, 1994). Here we have two voices and a musical ambience, with a little girl describing a real or invented landscape she is contemplating from above: «This is the scrappy, faltering description of a possible landscape; some of its fragments may resonate with the island’s actual landscape, which is there in front of us and which we may have glimpsed here and there as we moved through the exhibition.»
In the Workshop Petitgand has opted for creating an information space open to all, where the visitor can consult, read, hear and view different kinds of documentary material bearing on the artist’s work: the textwork Mes écoutes (My Listenings, 2004/2013), archival records, interviews, earlier versions and so on.
Last of all, outdoors, in the Sculpture Wood, Petitgand presents the sound installation Je siffle au bord du quai (I’m Whistling on the Edge of the Platform, 2011/2013). With its seven loudspeakers hidden in the trees, this work inhabits the seeming tranquillity of the forest in the form of a faint, insistently repeated whistling, a recording interrupted from time to time by brief, staccato bursts of the deafening passage of a high-speed train, «giving you the feeling your head’s being cut off.»
DOMINIQUE PETITGAND
Born in 1965 in Laxou, in northeastern France, Dominique Petitgand lives and works in Paris and Nancy.
He devises, composes and constructs works using sound, speech, music and silence, which are to be listened to in the form of sound installations, broadcasts in darkness and recordings.
Since 1992 Dominique Petitgand has been composing and producing sound installations whose montages of voices, sounds, musical ambiences and periods of silence generate micro-worlds marked by an ongoing ambiguity between a reality principle – recordings of people speaking about themselves – and projection into a timelessly dreamlike, context-free fiction.
In works he describes as mental narratives and landscapes, he inventories almost obsessively – and with unfailing musicality – voices, actions and moods; thus he records things said, states, absences. The connections he sets up trigger a succession of mental images: a narrative space in which the repetition and elusiveness of identities, places and temporal structures suggest the actual construction – but also the withdrawal – of memory and ideas. Each work offers a potential, implicit story belonging solely to the listener.
This exclusive resort to sound situates Petitgand in a singular, shifting territory involving different artistic disciplines: he presents his works at listening sessions that are like concerts in the dark; on records; and at exhibitions, in the form of sound installations whose mode of diffusion is adapted to both the specific venue and the narrative in question. In this way each listener is offered a multifaceted, open-ended experience.
Petitgand shows regularly in France and abroad, in galleries, art centres and museums, and at art festivals. A number of his works have been acquired for public and private collections. He has made ten records and several books and monographs have been published about his use of sound and listening.
Dominique Petitgand is represented by the galleries gb agency (Paris) and e/static (Turin) for his sound installations, and by the Ici, d’ailleurs... label in Nancy for his records.
Il Y A Les Nuages Qui Avancent (There Are Clouds Moving In)
22 March – 21 June 2015
For its first exhibition of the year the International Centre for Art and Landscape is presenting a solo show by Dominique Petitgand, a major figure on the French contemporary art scene. There Are Clouds Moving In brings
together five sound installations – some of them premiering here – and two textworks in the art centre’s spaces and the Sculpture Wood. This event is an invitation to a new (re)discovery of the art centre, as voices, noise, words, silences and musical ambiences reverberate within its walls and set up invisible links.
As part of the Acting in This Landscape group show here in 2013 Dominique Petitgand offered the sound installation Proche, très proche (Close, Very Close, 2006/2013), which was the starting point for this solo exhibition. Petitgand likes to describe his works as narratives, as mental landscapes. He fashions his installations out of recordings of words, respiration, noises, and music, which he composes, puts to work, deconstructs and cuts up. His work explores language as sound, the human voice and the noises produced by the body and a handful of objects. These creations are non-material: their formulation is determined by their locations, contexts and media, all of whose characteristics they must take into account. They call for visitors in movement constructing their own listening practice and sound mix in the course of a spatial and mental journey.
Here Petitgand has adapted to the specific qualities and the architectural and acoustic possibilities of each space at the art centre: height, width, resonance, and closedness or openness towards the outside, with the sonority of each room playing a dominant part. The exhibition trail begins in the Lighthouse with the first installation, Les liens invisibles (The Invisible Links, 2013), which sets up at a distance a dialogue between a voice and sounds. We then continue into the Nave and the electric vibrations of De l’électricité dans l’air (Electricity in the Air, 2015). In the silences inbetween we detect wordless voices – coming from the Study Room – that create a link, a continuity between the rooms and between the works themselves. The exhibition title There Are Clouds Moving In is indirectly inspired by Il y a, ensuite (There is, later, 1994), on show in the Little Theatre. In this work a little girl describes a real or invented landscape she is contemplating from above, an account directly
echoed by the fact that the room gives onto Vassivière Lake, its dam and its surroundings.
The outdoor installation Je siffle au bord du quai (I’m Whistling on the Edge of the Platform, 2011/2013) is to be found in the Sculpture Wood. It inhabits the seeming tranquillity of the forest in the form of a recorded whistling broken by brief, deafening interruptions from a high-speed train.
The non-material nature of Petitgand’s work means it can be shown in very different settings and contexts. «But the central locus is art, because the world of art is the point where orphan practices, singular and with no stable status, come together.» (Dominique Petitgand, Installations (documents), 2009, Éditions MF.
In the Lighthouse at the art centre Dominique Petitgand is presenting the sound installation Les liens invisibles (Invisible Links, 2013), a variation on Proche, très proche (Close, Very Close), shown here in 2013. The first step in the exhibition, this work for five loudspeakers comes in two segments as a synchronous linking of two distinct, separated planes: sounds, then a voice. In the bottom of the lighthouse four speakers emit a series of noises «reminiscent of micro-manipulations of glass objects». As the visitor begins to climb the spiral staircase an increasingly loud voice is heard. At the top a fifth speaker is set up in front of the exit, from which one has a 360° view out over the Vassivière Island landscape. Accompanied by the noises being broadcast downstairs, the voice emerging from this speaker becomes clearer and delivers a narrative; one excerpt reads, «She’s saying a lot of things, she just says things that are, she says you can’t justify them, it’s as if they were invisible links...».
In the Nave we find the new work De l’électricité dans l’air (Electricity in the Air, 2015), a dozen loudspeakers set on the floor. In this high, resonant space sounds of electricity, impacts, splittings and vibrations intrude in fits and starts. In the intervening silences you also pick up wordless voices – calling, crying out, singing – coming from four loudspeakers on the walls of the Study Room: «A tattered, airy, gravity-free presence seemingly engaged in a secret relationship with the sounds from the Nave.»
At two points in the exhibition we come upon video screens «showing a series of short sentences in white letters on a black ground, passing in a mute, irregular, musical tempo. Also to be read in fragments, this written material adds a further layer to the exhibition trail’s sound strata, like low-key interference or a commentary or an extra, open window.»
In the Little Theatre is the work that gave its title to Petitgand’s exhibition Il y a, ensuite (There is, later, 1994). Here we have two voices and a musical ambience, with a little girl describing a real or invented landscape she is contemplating from above: «This is the scrappy, faltering description of a possible landscape; some of its fragments may resonate with the island’s actual landscape, which is there in front of us and which we may have glimpsed here and there as we moved through the exhibition.»
In the Workshop Petitgand has opted for creating an information space open to all, where the visitor can consult, read, hear and view different kinds of documentary material bearing on the artist’s work: the textwork Mes écoutes (My Listenings, 2004/2013), archival records, interviews, earlier versions and so on.
Last of all, outdoors, in the Sculpture Wood, Petitgand presents the sound installation Je siffle au bord du quai (I’m Whistling on the Edge of the Platform, 2011/2013). With its seven loudspeakers hidden in the trees, this work inhabits the seeming tranquillity of the forest in the form of a faint, insistently repeated whistling, a recording interrupted from time to time by brief, staccato bursts of the deafening passage of a high-speed train, «giving you the feeling your head’s being cut off.»
DOMINIQUE PETITGAND
Born in 1965 in Laxou, in northeastern France, Dominique Petitgand lives and works in Paris and Nancy.
He devises, composes and constructs works using sound, speech, music and silence, which are to be listened to in the form of sound installations, broadcasts in darkness and recordings.
Since 1992 Dominique Petitgand has been composing and producing sound installations whose montages of voices, sounds, musical ambiences and periods of silence generate micro-worlds marked by an ongoing ambiguity between a reality principle – recordings of people speaking about themselves – and projection into a timelessly dreamlike, context-free fiction.
In works he describes as mental narratives and landscapes, he inventories almost obsessively – and with unfailing musicality – voices, actions and moods; thus he records things said, states, absences. The connections he sets up trigger a succession of mental images: a narrative space in which the repetition and elusiveness of identities, places and temporal structures suggest the actual construction – but also the withdrawal – of memory and ideas. Each work offers a potential, implicit story belonging solely to the listener.
This exclusive resort to sound situates Petitgand in a singular, shifting territory involving different artistic disciplines: he presents his works at listening sessions that are like concerts in the dark; on records; and at exhibitions, in the form of sound installations whose mode of diffusion is adapted to both the specific venue and the narrative in question. In this way each listener is offered a multifaceted, open-ended experience.
Petitgand shows regularly in France and abroad, in galleries, art centres and museums, and at art festivals. A number of his works have been acquired for public and private collections. He has made ten records and several books and monographs have been published about his use of sound and listening.
Dominique Petitgand is represented by the galleries gb agency (Paris) and e/static (Turin) for his sound installations, and by the Ici, d’ailleurs... label in Nancy for his records.