Fabienne Lasserre

My practice is a stubborn imposition of my wishes/politics on matter. We are (I am) finite, imperfect, and needy. Yet what does it mean to be nothing more than fragile? I use malleable materials that have an indistinct structure. These –hair, fabric, felt- are non-hierarchical: no part differs from the other, has a specialized role, dominates or leads. Paint is liminal: fluid and solid, simultaneously matter (substance), and illusion (depiction). It has nothing to do with flatness or two-dimensional space. I make works that are in between sculptures and paintings, as representations of an “excluded middle”, the part that is left out when things are divided into categories. These considerations extend to my interest in science-fiction and mythology. In these narratives, ‘truth’ is stretched, mixed, turned over. The departure from realism permits a re-evaluation of what is assumed to be natural. For instance, aliens and monsters negate standard definitions of the Body. Their improbable morphologies mix species and genders, and often bind masculine and feminine attributes. Immovable concepts such as sexuality, biology, or matter are made shaky and relative. Making and doing, ethics, aesthetics, and day-to-day life are connected and contiguous. I stretch and elongate forms, arriving at shapes and volumes through pressure and touch, a blind effort to get somewhere without a plan. I warp, twist, lean, and stack because these states evoke a rich array of relations of desire, repulsion, aggression, cooperation, affection, mercy and cruelty. Wandering/wondering, I create “things” –simultaneously metaphor and ‘real’ thing- that function in a system of porous categories and unstable identities. It is a model with its own rules, from which to compare and dispute prevailing structures and narratives.