Thursday, August 26, 2010

Exhibiting Artist : Armel Hostiou


In a short narrative that transitions from representation of a figure to an abstraction, BMB (can't say goodbye) reveals a secret limit that can be passed in one direction but not in the other.

The emotion of feeling trapped is wistful and sometimes, oppressive. Hostiou uses glass, and water, a glass-like substance, to speak of invisible barriers such as time. Desiring for a view of the city, a woman is able to enter her balcony through a large, open window. But she is unable to return into the room because the open space now bears an impenetrable transparency. The only - and momentary - indication of this surface is the vapor of the actor's breath, soon replaced by streams of water running down the glass plane as though they were tears on a face. Trapped, the world behind the woman becomes dark. The subject disappears behind the torrential wall of water, only to leave behind a few streaks of water on the invisible glass pane and a few dots of light in the background.

Through this mutation and disappearance of space, location and person, Hostiou presents the notion of time as a filter for matters or actions one way but not backwards. Her work is unique in this festival for the way in which it shift the perception of glass' invisible hardness : as a one-way membrane. In doing so using video, she weaves doubt between absence and presence to represent two states of mind, time or situation.

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