In 2016, the D.R.A.C P.A.C.A helped La Station to create temporary residencies for visual artists. La Station chose to propose two residencies for a term of four months. For each of them, a grant of € 3,500 is paid to the artists, enabling them to ensure the production, transports, travels and per diem. Housing is allotted to them downtown as well as a studio of a surface of 40m² at La Station. Two one-time residents for the year 2017 were chosen: Anne Lise Le Gac in the Spring and Ken Sortais in the Fall. This exhibition presents their research during these residencies.

AIRE VENGA would be the bastard fathered by KEVIN, Ken Sortais’ dark alter ego and Ange 92KCAL, a character out of Anne Lise Le Gac’s La Caresse du Coma. An exhibition-child conceived outside the norm, translating the entanglement of references and practices composing the visual-art glossary of these artists. Symbolical, mutant and fabulous, their works play with our aesthetic and social paradigms, acting like talismans against an (un)certain state of the world.

For a year, Ken Sortais has been constructing his practice around a character known as KEVIN, a phantasmagorical double with an unstable nature, living as a recluse from society in a cave surrounded by his fetishes. During his night-time outings, KEVIN « hunts » statues in public areas he does not hesitate breaking to take possession of some fragments: resulting in videos and installations opening the door to the mysterious adventures of this unstable outsider.

AIRE VENGA is a new immersion into « KEVIN’s nightmares », a serial project confronting the character with his own demons. In this latest opus, Louis XV and his cohorts gather to haunt the hero’s dreams, interweaving with an unstable architecture their monstrous and grotesque faces.

Drawing as much from the Antique statuary art as from the works of J. G. Ballard, Ken Sortais constructs a singular mythology, populated with underground and allegorical figures. In this uncertain but familiar universe, he maintains a permanent ambivalence between the real and the fantasy, the said and the implied, the visible and the hidden.

Anne Lise Le Gac also constructs a very personal mythology: her most recent performances, collected in featuring videos under the title La Caresse du Coma, depict characters seeking happiness. They do not know each other but exchange advice, beliefs and practices, united by the certainty of living in an infinitely lively world. For AIRE VENGA, she calls onto the figure of ANGE 92KCAL, a guide and activist of the « naturecultures », leading a workshop of Harmonization Between Company Species. She is the main character of the featuring video imagined during her residency at La Station in Spring 2017.

Taking a real situation as a starting point – a sectarian seminar – Anne Lise Le Gac diverts the doctrinal spirit to compose around the notion of otherness an enthusiastic score made of dialogues, dances and songs. Her characters are heterogeneous and summon as well Houellebecq, Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, as Booba or Raël. Her performances are accompanied with video projections in which gifs, memes and text extracts come after one another in a bit outdated « Word 98″ aesthetics.

La Caresse du Coma is constructed like a drift: chapters after chapters, Anne Lise Le Gac adjusts her discourse, always looking at « bastardising the real to let fiction ooze out of it », said fiction unfolding from a desire to redefine our relation to the other, be it human, digital, animal or even vegetal.

Pictures of the exhibition