Solo show, Lauren Lee McCarthy
Le Lieu Unique
Curator et scenographer Thierry Fournier
https://www.lelieuunique.com/en/event/exhibition-lauren-lee-mc-carthy-what-can-i-do-for-you
Quai Ferdinand-Favre, 44000 Nantes, France
As part of Le Voyage à Nantes (A Journey to Nantes), Tuesday to Sunday, 10am – 7pm, closed Mondays
What can I do for you? (Que puis-je pour vous ?) is the first solo show of the californian artist Lauren Lee McCarthy in France. Bringing together 14 works created by over the last 10 years, it is also one of the first international retrospectives devoted to her work.
Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of automation, surveillance, and algorithmic living. She creates situations in which she frequently takes the place of devices (personal assistants, IA, fictitious surrogate mother, etc.) by interacting with their users. In doing so, she brings out the human where we least expect it, and raises very universal questions about care, otherness and power. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Having already curated and published Lauren Lee McCarthy’s works on two occasions (here and here), I imagined this exhibition and suggested that Le Lieu Unique produce and host it.
Le Lieu Unique is characterised by its intense multidisciplinary activity (exhibitions music, theater), its post-industrial building (the former LU biscuits factory) and a large international audience in summer with the artistic event Le Voyage à Nantes. In this context, and as text features prominently in the artist’s works, we decided to display them in bilingual versions, to make the exhibition widely accessible.
Photo © Maud Levavasseur
The curatorial project aims to highlight the evolution of the artist’s work and the links between performances, films and installations. The scenography amplifies the ‘domestic’ aesthetic that the artist often employs to explore the relationships between intimacy, sociality and technology — resonating with the post-industrial character of the venue.
It borrows the language of a film studio, or a furniture department store. It is composed by a series of colourful open spaces, under the saw-shed roof through which we let the daylight filter, to avoid any black box effect and instead, ensure that a common space remains ever present. The films are grouped thematically in lounges, which also allow for a comfortable viewing.
The exhibition opens with a large-scale projection: a video edit of extracts from the artist’s films, which invites visitors into her world:
Photo © Maud Levavasseur
It continues with The Changing Room, a large interactive installation at the centre of the exhibition, whose texts, lights, colours and sounds change according to the emotions chosen by visitors. The work can be seen as questioning the way in which we see technology as a sort of oracle, from which we would expect revelations about ourselves:
Photo © Maud Levavasseur
Below, one of the spaces dedicated to the films with the Muted works series, such as the performance and film Social Turkers, in which Turk workers advise Lauren Lee McCarthy on how to behave during dates with people she met on OkCupid.
For Surrogate, a series of performances, installations and films in which Lauren Lee McCarthy takes on the role of a surrogate mother and questions the numerous resulting issues of control, we have reconstituted an apparatus previously created for this work: three large and concentric benches in the shape of waves, to consult 6 films in this cycle:
Production Le Lieu Unique
With support from Espace Multimédia Gantner
French translations:Thierry Fournier
Lauren Lee McCarthy’s studio assistant: Wylie Kasai
Thierry Fournier’s assistant and 3D model of the exhibition: Thomas Gendre
Exhibition views: Maud Levavasseur and Thierry Fournier