View of the exhibition "Time Snares" in 2007 at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin Miami Miami (U.S.A.)
Courtesy Perrotin
"Time Snares"
by Christophe Kihm
The title of Tatiana Trouvé’s exhibition, “Time Snares,” provides insight into one of the constant features found throughout the artist’s work: its relationship to time. This shouldn’t be interpreted in any literal sense of the term, however, as this would mean that each object in the installation would be construed as a Time Snare. Bus shelters, beehive hairdryers like those used in hair salons, hieratic leather-clad sculptures, and hanging skins can bring to mind situations or states marked by time to various degrees—waiting, stopping, or changes due to the passage of time. But these various associations don’t mask the primary characteristics of these objects, which inscribe them in a specific relationship to time: they are skeletons, marks and ghosts. And the very source of this phantom-filled ensemble is memory itself—which explains the eerily unsettling feeling that grips us as soon as we set eyes on them.
Memory is not a storehouse in which past recollections remain intact ; it changes dimension and form, disassembling and piecing itself together again and again. Here, observing how time works is not about observing how artistic activity (Tatiana Trouvé’s, as well as that of many other artists) is linked to temporal processes or referents, a link that is made very frequently: Each work in the exhibition serves as a kind of reminder, and memory—as a “Time Snare”—is what is actually configuring the site of the representation. These echos and reverberations are perceptible by dint of a formal principle that triggers the metamorphosis of the drawing’s two dimensions into a three-dimensional work.
This experimentation in memory thus implies, in the artist’s work, a singular link of the matieral, formal and conceptual in which potential ideas, latent spaces and phantomesque entities are powerfully linked.
