November 15 – December 27, 2008
Galerie Lucile Corty
Paris, France
Artists
Katarina Burin, with Josh Shaddock and Lisa Tan
In her drawings, sculptures and collages, Katarina Burin (born Slovakia 1976) delves into the history of architecture and design, both famous and commonplace, with an eye to how images and documents both represent the past and live in the world today.
For Ambassador Suites, she plays on common emblems of the city: storefronts and display windows. Inspired by a mysterious window display at an “Import/Export” business in a neighboring street in Paris, Burin assembled different bodies of work in a loose evocation of a travel agency. Imbedded in this idea is not only “travel” but “tourism” and the selling of leisure. For the window of the gallery, Burin designed a multi-part screen structure, combining fragments of imagery with replicas of building models from the other storefront. The forms of the screens are mimicked in the Leisure Ensembles, sculptural shelves that present found images as both movable and interwoven. Upstairs, drawings made by hand spraying ink through stencils, recreate images from hotel and leisure industry matchbooks.
At the same time Burin has curated the work of two other artists into her conception of travel, advertising and tourism. Josh Shaddock (born 1973), living in New York, shows the piece Red White and Blue, 24 flags from sovereign countries that have those colors. Using a common symbol that is imbued with political and social meaning, he strips the content out of the piece, attributing to it a set of formal criteria, simplifying and yet confusing our usual read. The New York based artist Lisa Tan (born 1973) shows a piece from the series Baudelaire Itineraries in which texts by the author are appropriated to provide destinations for proposed journeys. She will also show a new video of mountain images taken from National Geographic magazine alongside their corresponding back pages, literalizing a metaphoric passage from front to back.