Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Reading : A - Art
Marc Camille Chamowicz at Inverleith House
Chaimowicz’s major solo exhibition at Inverleith House occupied all three public floors and was developed as a series of interconnected installations. Chaimowicz’s methods involved a juxtaposition of new and historical works that sought to engage with the domestic scale of the interior (Inverleith House’s original use as a private residence) in the Proustian sense of seeing objects as animated characters, anthropomorphic receptacles for memory which are capable of ‘pulling the past into the present’. As with previous exhibitions and his engagement with the distinctions drawn between the decorative and ‘Fine’ Arts the installation developed his preoccupation with the slippage between the prosaic function of objects and their poetic or allegorical performance. The resultant mise-en-scène was composed of new works by Chaimowicz, including a series of large scale hand-printed panels and rolls of screenprinted wallpaper, developed through research into the previous décor of the house. Chaimowicz also designed and commissioned the production of a rug, in association with Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios (funded by Inverleith House and part-funded by Creative Scotland). Interspersed with these artworks Chaimowicz curated a selection of chairs, dressing tables, bookcases, ceramics, found objects, wallpaper, drawings, textiles and paintings such as gouache studies by the French artist Raoul Dufy, plates from The Temple of Flora (1977-1807) from the Garden’s Library archive and a painting by Édouard Vuillard on loan from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.