Where Does it Go Now? ( Annie Hémond Hotte) Curated by Shane Walsh.
While architecture implies the elements in space, the idea of a landscape is the space itself; involving everything - the background, the subjects, the geometry. In Annie Hémond Hotte’s paintings the set-ups represented are billed in the same way; the characters are not only placed inside an environment, they are the environment themselves. Ephemeral, these strange assemblage-people made from gestures, shapes and reorganized objects exist only in specific timing. In fact, they depend on it. It is as if the paintings catch specific moments – you might say, “they were in the right place at the right time,” to create a character or a scene but we can also imagine them disassembling themselves seconds later. The paintings are both spectators and snapshots of these lucky coincidences, a balance of perspective. Loose nostalgic compositions and constructions, defined by a certain laissez-faire, the characters cast in the work could look like artifacts of “lost cultures”, or “decline of an empire”, reminding us, with a dark humor, the possibility of an end or failure at any time.
A mess of life styles, personal and cultural rituals, the work could make us ask: Can the human mind be compared to an architectural shape, a structure, or a methodology? Is it possible to embody a certain comedy? How much does timing determine what we become? And how much does the idea of the “Character” shape a personal identity or a social model?
In Where Does It Go Now, Annie asks herself how humanity determines its expectation of “how and what will be the future?” Imagined inside a specific momentum belonging to the present time, our projection of a future only exists in the “Now” and “Then” – 2001: A Space Odyssey belongs to the ‘60’s! The ‘2015’ in Back to the Future was only a concept credible in the 80’s! These fictive “Futures” don’t exist in time, but ironically, they affect and influence what generations anticipate and expect. Following these thoughts, Annie opens the door on what now could be the “future” of our era, and how we interact with this conception.
