Lucie Laflorentie
Catch The Dust
July 12 – August 17, 2019
“Lucie Laflorentie catches the dust. The dust of the New Mexico Highlands, the dust that flies from hills to gardens, from gardens to houses, onto the floor of the gallery. The wind’s dust that spreads the unwritten stories of a land full of history.
Lucie Laflorentie opens her exhibition in the middle of a three-month residency at Mayeur Projects, with her energy, her passion, her deep thinking too. The works are bodies of a mix of culture and nature, nonsites in the purest tradition of Land Art (at Toulouse Art School, she dedicated her memoir to Michael Heizer), with the dazzling age of the Internet and a greatly accelerated entropy compared to the time of the pioneers’ experiences.
About digging : Here in New Mexico, Lucie dug literally and figuratively. For her, memory is material, in the tension between emptiness and fullness, language and matter. Because what is peculiar to Las Vegas New Mexico, in contrast to its neighbor Santa Fe, is that it is an apparent void, which demands to experience it in order to reveal itself, as new residents Frank and Jane Beurskens recently told us.
No exhibitionism, no extraversion in Las Vegas NM. But a history rich in a thousand strata: the Wildest of the Wild West conceals a history of geology, wildlife, cultures with their mixtures and their clashes, the railway, the textile industry, Hispanic, Old Western, Victorian, Vernacular, Modernist architectures, a history of prestigious hotels with Fred Harvey saga, an uninterrupted history of cinema, an infinity of layers of colors and styles. History made also of religious strata, of social strata. Las Vegas is from its origin a model of tolerance as well as a territory of experimentation.
Lucie walks in the footsteps of this crazy and gentle tradition, with the violence just necessary for the transmission of energy. Biting the earth, walls, foundations, bringing her geometry of desire and above all, her deep respect and love of the people here. A farmers’ daughter from the French Southwest, she knows the strength of the elements, the importance of making friends with rain, earth, wind and rocks. And also that machines are prosthetics to alleviate the pain of human labor. Lucie perfectly knows that in every gesture mixed with the breath of the desert and the breaths of those who face it on a daily basis, there is a soul, a soul of gold.
Lucie Laflorentie’s residency is supported by a grant of the Occitanie region (France).
