Miri Segal "Mortals and Automatons" at Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris

May 28, 2009 - June 27, 2009

 

Galerie Kamel Mennour is pleased to present “Mortals and
Automatons”, the Israeli artist Miri Segal’s second solo exhibition.
Like many modern-day artists, Miri Segal’s academic background
was initially unconnected with art, her PhD having focused on
mathematics. Traces of this can be found in her present work. The
nature of illusion, at once optical and psychological, is essentially
the constant driving force behind the deconstruction and
reconstruction of subtle and clever machinery, leading to a
questioning of “the viewer” – so called by Marcel Duchamp – on
the place of the subject in relation to the work and the setting.
Several exhibitions have allowed us to understand and fully
experience Miri Segal’s work. Each one increased the number of
situations in which the vision found itself caught up in a whirlwind
of significations and interdependencies, giving prominence to the
alienation of each of us from the world of images: a way of
reminding us, as Paul Ardenne has intelligently underlined
regarding the artist, that “we have a body” and that the practice
of art is also there to help us to understand this. But if the art of
Miri Segal, over the course of numerous exhibitions in Israel, in the
USA, or previously with Kamel Mennour in 2006, constantly
emphasises that we have eyes, and if the visible and appearances
are undoubtedly her recurrent themes, I would also like to point
out that sound and voice are unfailingly the constituent elements
of her various devices. While this notion has become one of the
commonest features of the art of our time, it is undoubtedly
important to clarify the extent to which it allows us to describe
the work of Miri Segal. With it, the work confronts the sensorial
and mental chaos of our contemporary world. With it, each
proposal is an interrogation of our relationship with space and
time, with fixedness as with movement. Despite her training as a
mathematician, Miri Segal is nonetheless a sensitive analyst of
Erwin Panofsky’s “perspective as symbolic form”.
The recent works that she is now exhibiting have elements of
constructions that are simultaneously clever and distinct. Miri
Segal is reluctant to do anything makeshift from a pratical and
symbolic aspect. Bound by her education, she would rather seek
precision, a point of exactitude from which a whirlwind of
emotions and meanings can tempt us. The body, our body, is thus
the receptacle of infinite experiences, a play on the meaning and
meanings open to multiple interpretations. The present
exhibition is made up of five pieces. To describe them would
destroy their charm and demonstrate clearly, more so here than
elsewhere, that experiencing the text is no substitute for
experiencing the image and sound. Suffice it to say that they all
conjure up the essential opposition Miri Segal intends to set up
between “Mortals and Automatons”, between the living and the
artefact, between the real and its multiple forms of
representation. A quotation from Shakespeare serves, both
literally and figuratively, as an inscription and a reflection upon an
optical and mental crossing of space. Language connects to
science. Here, Shakespeare’s meditation on humanity finds its
illusory and illusionist extension.
“Understanding”, a second, recently-made device again catches
language in the trap of its multiple significations. In a virtual space,
which she sets up according to processes that are not without an
echo of Richard Wolheim’s analysis of Manet’s use of space, Miri
Segal constructs her statement according to a fundamentally
theatrical logic. Games of inverted mirrors, behind the scenes; the
process of understanding the world is always a process of
projection. Here, it gives its title to the whole piece, playing with
the literality between the construction of the work and its
proper subject. Another device once again makes use of the highly
significant relationship between language and its signification.
“Understanding” and “standing” are linked together as two notions
and two distinct states. Mental image and visual translation as a
language and a science are the double-sided processes at work in
the art of Miri Segal. 


“Whatever you say”, a parrot filmed by Miri Segal, shuffles back
and forth on a perch, repeating the words spoken by the viewer
into a microphone. Image and text, animal communication and
human language: Miri Segal likes technological experimentations.
Here, she extends them with this intriguing proposition, a
paradigm of the mutual fascination between science and art. The
experimental dimension – one, incidentally, which fascinates Emile
Benveniste – is much cleverer than it appears, and doubtless
echoes the complexity that comes with the unusual relationship
between human race and one of the only feathered creatures
able to repeat what it hears without (perhaps?) understanding it.”
(...)
One can think that Miri Segal’s art takes after language games and
their conversion into images. One can think that these visual and
sound devices have something of a plastic interpretation of the
world’s complexity and processes. But we can only really grasp
their scope by experiencing them in the flesh. In this regard, the
extraordinary device that she entitles “Beam from between your
eyes” (2008) can be seen as a paradigm. Condensing different
forms of spatial rhetoric, making use of both optical and visual
projection, she takes her inspiration from a Robert Walser novella
that describes, in a single page, a creature’s frantic goal of
travelling to the end of the earth. Miri Segal turns this vision,
trapped by language, into a spatial environment where theatre
and projection come together, where distortions and anamorphic
points of view allow us to see that we are all in the middle of
nowhere. It is here that Miri Segal’s art indubitably touches upon a
specifically philosophical dimension: she wishes to talk about our
condition and the inexorable “fantasy” of every traveller. The
work bears witness both to the dream of being in the light of the
image and to the promise of representation: once again, an art of
projection – in every sense – yet also a sweeping take on the risk
of not being able to settle at the core of the world about which
we revolve and which, in return, revolves unfailingly around us.
- Bernard Blistène

   (Extract of a text to be published about the artist) (Translation : James Curwen)

 

Born in 1965 in Haifa (Israel), Miri Segal lives and works in Tel Aviv.
Her work has featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions: at
PS1 in New York, the Lisson Gallery in London, the Pompidou
Centre and the Maison Rouge – Fondation Antoine de Galbert
(Paris), at Jerusalem’s Biennale Art Focus, at the Chelsea Museum of
Art in New York, at Vienna’s Kunsthalle (Austria), at the Tel Aviv
Museum of Art, at the Tokyo Wonder Site (Tokyo), at the Musée
de Lucerne (Switzerland), and at the Museum of Modern Art in
San Francisco.