Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway. Camille Henrot works between painting, drawing, video, collage, ikebana and cast bronze, but to my mind her ultimate material is feeling.
Scratching at the varnish we layer over human chaos β the ordering systems of social manners, calendar time, billing cycles, bureaucratic forms β she exposes the fluid, discomforting affects that arise from change, ambivalence and care. Taking influence from psychoanalytic theories related to early childhood development and the latent eroticism of child-rearing, Henrot builds environments that nurture a continuity of being. Her studio in Midtown Manhattan feels like a cocoon: an appropriate space from which such intricate and introspective work can emerge.
A hallway decorated with exhibition posters and magazines leads to a space brimming with books, enough to teach an entire semester. In the kitchen, a collection of tea mugs shares space with a display of ceramic plates designed by Henrot herself.
In the workspace, a wall showcases a set of very large Japanese or Korean brushes, hanging just beside a chartreuse and violet painting. From the major moods to minor feelings, she offers all shades of affect, as multifarious as the riotous colours of her digital and acrylic palettes. Gallen, featured a leashed gaggle of sculpted canines lingering in a room of lavender and Kelly green-filtered natural light.
What can an adult audience bring forth in themselves through a similar spirit of play? Where do we rest and where do we come to life? The questions have priority over the answers. In a new video work, the legendary artist summons a whole slew of inhumanity among deranged, machine-imagined scenes. From a bold architectural intervention in New York to a group exhibition in Los Angeles on the science of sex. As the fair returns to Santa Monica in , take a look back at standout works, performances and initiatives from its first five editions.
