Missing Missing

Based in Los Angeles, American artist Emily Mast works on the cusp between the visual and the performing arts, displacing viewer expectations by tweaking the presentation codes of theatre and dance.

Part of a tradition that includes Guy de Cointet and Jacques Tati, with references to Mike Kelley and Simone Forti as well, she makes a very personal use of casting, staging, action, text and sound effects in juggling with the boundaries between disciplines and rethinking the connections between exhibition, display and the public.

Her performances and ephemeral installations combine the body, movement, sound and quirky personal experience in turning uncertainty into an art material at once sculptural and alive. B!RDBRA!N (2012), Offending the Audience (2011) and Six Twelve One by One (2013) are exercises in deliberate miscasting of, respectively, a sign-language interpreter, a group of children, and six pregnant women. All her works involve the development of a world of signs to be deciphered and a deconstruction of the conventions governing language and modes of communication.

For this first solo exhibition outside the United States, Mast has choreographed a procession through the Art Centre, guiding participants with sound tracks, video projections, theatre lighting and, from time to time, a liaison person or a child. Orchestrated as a retrospective yet simultaneously brand new score, the exhibition revolves around a ‘refrain’ of recent drawings and films, stage objects to be handled and the vestiges of a site-specific performance.

until June 28, 2015
Emily Mast
Missing Missing
Centre d’art contemporain
de la Ferme du Buisson
allée de la Ferme, Noisiel