Damoisie
Frank Elbaz gallery, Paris - 2005
mixed media
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Sandrine Pelletier is pursuing her reappropriation of ordinary objects and the exploration of their strong symbolic connota- tions. She is now interested in the old fashioned world of grandmothers. The techniques used by the artist -embroidery and crochet- perfectly correspond to this world, but her works call to the mind the image of a spider weaving in the shadow, in some remote corner of the house rather than the one of a grandma knitting in her cozy living room. Like a spider hunting for its prey, the artist captures fragments of reality which will feed her tremendous imagination. Through her black humor she has created a parallel world of grandmothers, where the loyal poodles become ghostly and diabolic creatures and the usually hidden denture openly smiles at the onlooker form a tapestry.
A sinister mold is smearing the tidy living rooms of these old ladies. All the objects surrounding this eerie organic presence seem to be contaminated by it. The entire room seems to be going through a process of metamorphosis which culminates in the tentacular Mademoiselle. Visitors are invited to join this uncanny masquerade: instead of leaving their signatures on the traditional guestbook they can comfortably sit on the alluring portrait of the artist and leave a message on her personal answering machine.
The unnatural marriages between opposites provoked by Sandrine Pelletier have generated hybrid creatures which seem to be waiting for close encounters of the third kind. One should not be surprised: aliens are also joining in.
Marguerite Pilven
