Charlotte Moth

For her forthcoming solo exhibition, the first in a French museum, Charlotte Moth has focused her attention on the collection and the MAMC+ museum renovation. Since 2021, Charlotte Moth has worked like a researcher doing field work at the museum. She has scrutinised the transformations to the building while delving deep in the collection storages to bring gems back to life.

Her new series of analogue photographs bring together works of the collection from diverse geographies, cultures and disciplines: design, artefacts, modern and contemporary art, non-Western material culture. Printed on mat paper, with subtle grey tonal transitions, a sculpture of a 16th century monk is in a surprisingly seamless dialogue with a sculpture by Sol LeWitt; a lamp by designer Ugo La Pietra with a wooden doll from Ghana. The unexpected duos poetically question the established canons of art history while offering new imaginary narrations.

The first part of the exhibition situates the viewer phenomenologically. A direct confrontation in space (mirror), with colour (blue), materials (feathers) and primary forms (cones) offers a sensorial experience that opens up the senses to approach the rest of the exhibition. The second room is a sculptural landscape from which photographs appear here and there. A forest of metal structures draws vertical and horizontal circuits in space. Architectural views of the museum under renovation, from the emptying phase, through destruction, to its progressive new skin, are juxtaposed with approximately thirty black and white photographs of couples, pairings of works from the museum collection, permanent inhabitants of a constantly morphing world. These spatialised images alternate with coloured glass and paper that reinforce a sense of theatricality. Moth’s poems accompany the images and provide a literary resonance to the formal and mental associations she has created. In a highly personal form, Charlotte Moth narrates, describes, compares, and interprets works in the collection, based on the information collected from the archives or the lack thereof. The collection of poems, are read or recited during regular performances in the exhibition space. Imbued by lilac light, the last room presents a looped 16mm film in which mysteriously weighted feathers cascade. Highly elaborate costumes hang, waiting for the next performance.

Charlotte Moth’s « A rounded landscape » activates the 600 m² space as an alchemy of artworks, places, epochs, mediums and practices. The collection is considered at a whole and the museum as a locus for infinite potential encounters between objects. Through approximately fifty images, the exhibition proposes an inner journey, outside time, during which the artworks are encouraged to exist, differently.

This project by Charlotte Moth « A Rounded Landscape / Un paysage arrondi » was selected by the Patrons of the Fondation des Artistes who provided invaluable enabling support.