PISCINE MUNICIPALE

“One step down the ladder, the water felt colder than expected—an unsatisfactory luck-warm touch on my foot. The chlorine tickles my nose. And a symphony of high-pitched screams and laughter from children playing in the next pool feels like overwhelming rush hours. Another step down the ladder, twisting my hips and holding tight to the sidebars. I am now facing the concrete edge of what separates gravity and unsolidness. The perpetuated movements from all this unsynchronized underwater choreography are rippling to the edges, splashing my collarbones. Third step down the ladder: What am I doing here? Last step left, water up to my neck, a gentle strangling embrace is holding me tight and calling me in. I can feel my ears looking forward to conversing with the water waves, filtering the disharmonies of overexcited kids.”

Through a narrated fantasy, “Piscine Municipale” presents a site specific installation inspired by the gallery’s architecture setting. Lorie Ballage ́s intention is to create a space where one can feel immersed within a fictious and uncanny approach of a public swimming pool atmosphere by the means of ceramic sculptures and industrial materials. The diversion of spatial functionality from its initial environment and the notion of resistance occurring from the lack of water are the primary parameters of the exhibition. In a grandly dysfunctional variation, all these notions which are an abstraction of a longing can manifest this inherent force which will always exceed us.

On the drifts of a journey around the unfeasible, useless gestures and failures to come, the work of Lorie Ballage is a dedication to tragedy as a grand ideological narrative. Her works can be perceived as utopian errors aiming to represent the potentialities of failure – thrills which results from unfortunate events, loss of control and uncertainty. The error has an inherent aura of resistance in which resides the nuances, the mistakes, the flaws, all the things that define us as individuals.

Lorie Ballage (b.1994, France) holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Dundee, Scotland and a Master of Fine Art from the Art Academy of Bergen, Norway, where she currently resides.