ART-PRESENTATION: The Perfume And The Bottle
The exhibition “The Perfume and the Bottle” at Parisian Laundry in Montreal presents a selection of works by 5 artists that are deliberately seductive. The works presented borrow from advertising imagery, methods of display, and modes of categorisation, evoking a sense of nostalgia and operating within recognizable visual languages of mass consumerism.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Parisian Laundry Archive
The aroma lingered and held onto the inside of the bottle as long as it could. Eventually it would detach the scent fulfilling its ephemeral fate, while the ornamental glass receptacle endured. The reflective label triggers that particular scent, as would the shadow cast on the wall when the light would meet the bottle’s profile in the late afternoon. Gabriele Beveridge collects faded hair salon posters and beauty shop ads. She seeks out doubles, skewing or cropping these found images that are paired with photograms and adorned with artist made frames, hand blown glass elements and crystal balls to explore tropes of eternity, ephemera, beauty, and mystique. Andy Coolquitt is a quintessential collector of refuse, consistently repurposing the dirty everyday into display patterns and vitrines. Here, Coolquitt’s vitrines present washed up deodorant sticks, their surfaces, naturally roughened by the passage of time, appear as if cast in stone or marble. These indexes of irredeemable materials are, ironically, now (and forever), re-categorised as art. In Owen Kydd’s photographs, objects on display are endlessly looped to a nearly Lynchian effect of perpetual unease and fascination. Her positioning of the screen as art object also draws equivalence between his media and the things he pictures, between the constancy of photography and the dynamism of video. Kate Steciw suspends fractured and re-purposed stock imagery in her mobile-esque photographic sculptures. The seemingly random assemblages speak directly to the mass consumption and rapid digestion of images. Steciw halts this process, as she suspends the images in free fall. Moreover, new collaborative work with Anne Hall centers on the cyanotype, creating permanence in these imprints of simple objects.
Info: Parisian Laundry, 3550 Saint-Antoine Ouest, Montréal, Duration: 8/9-8/10/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-17:00, http://parisianlaundry.com
