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B e a t r i c e

A m r h e i n

I n s t a l l a t i o n

P e r f o r m a n c e* * * * * * *

V a l e n t i n e

P h o t o g r a p h i e s

V i d e o s

D r a w i n g s


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V i d e o s

LOVESTREAMS

7.77

BEATRICE VALENTINE AMRHEINLOVESTREAMS 7.77

This document and all its contents : art works, concepts and logos are registered and protected by the EU copyright INPI law and the Intellectual property and Authors Rights Worldwide Organization.

THE VIDEO FILM

With LOVESTREAMS 7.77 BVA presents one of her first video film, which combines and mixes the specifities of video, photo, painting.

Within 7 minutes 77 seconds, this video film links a direct reference to John Casavettes's movie called "Love Streams".

As long time ago, BVA has written on her studio's wall: "I wish my life was a Hollywood movie show because celluloid heroes never feel any pain."

Another reference is about the RAP's battle in music as she is always impressed by the way how this "word's duel" tries to open new spaces.

This video functions as a duel where the spectator looses his reference points and finds himself hesitating between fictional images and real images.

BEATRICE VALENTINE AMRHEINLOVESTREAMS 7.77


Screenshots LOVESTREAMS 7.77

VIDEOS lustreI n s t a l l a t i o n

P e r f o r m a n c e

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V i d e o s

PAINTING WITH CELL PHONES

Like all great artists, Béatrice Valentine Amrhein knows how to brilliantly combine the ultra-contemporary with the traditional. Her latest work, the VIDEOS Lustre installation, is designed entirely using cell phones.

The screens of one hundred multimedia cell phones suspended from the ceiling by a braid of electric cables twinkle and hum as they each broadcast a specific, original video, all of which were produced, both images and sounds, using cell phones which, with an implacable esthetic coherency, are at the same time the tools, the components and the material of the work.

One shouldn't be fooled though, this isn't just a question of some high-tech gadget, but of a real painterly approach to artistic creation. In the early 1970s, Christian Boltanski affirmed that he was «painting with photography». Today, Béatrice Valentine Amrhein is painting with cell phones, because they have become the natural extension of the eye and the hand.

With solid training in painting and long experience as a painter, she here become part, and this in a completely original manner, of a vast current of contemporary art with the objective of reinventing the act of painting and so anchor it firmly in the 21st century.

Painting is not limited only to the age-old alliance of colored pigments and canvas hung on a wall, but rather is considered as an artistic way of doing and seeing something. It's a question of body, of gesture and of material.

Seeing in painting signifies being sensitive to the act, to objects, to qualities of light, to materials and to shapes, to temporalities and to opacities, as well as to the echoes that emanate from all of the history of art, as well as the murmurs of the world hidden in the folds of the works themselves.

It's this open and contemporary conception of painting that Béatrice Valentine Amrhein literally puts into practice via the cell phones.

Through a pixelization process pushed to the extreme, their mediocre technical definition made it possible for her to obtain a new and original texture of images to which the feeble video performances give a distinctive jerky effect. The singularity of her result as well, with the conversion of the technical weakness of the tools used into an esthetic strength.

Béatrice Valentine Amrhein makes use of the visual and auditory material obtained in this way, and the proximity authorized by the perspective of cell phones, to represent bodies, to examine them, to interfere with their folds, and to travel all over the surface of their skin and their surroundings, in order to reach, beyond these surfaces, their «bodily system» to draw up a sensory map.

The pictorial approach of the VIDEOS lustre is prolonged by a «Wall of images» composed of twenty-one large format photographic prints (118 cm x 135 cm) of views taken from the phone videos. While at the same time the problem of the body that irrigates the entire work is actualized through interactivity: three of the videos are projected in continuity on amazing air screens through which the spectator is invited to walk and so literally enter into and become part of the work.

André Rouillé

Art Critic

BEATRICE VALENTINE AMRHEINVIDEOS lustre


VIDEOS lustre Installation

SHOW OFF Paris 2006



« TIME » EXHIBITION IN SPRING 2007

On the occasion of the « Time » exhibit that will take place at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art in Spring 2007, BVA will present her sculpture installation « VIDEOS lustre », the installation will also include a « WALL of images » that will cover a space more than 7 meters long and 4 meters high of the museum entry hall and « Video PROJECTIONS » on invisible screens created by means of a revolutionary modified air screen technology.

The public will also be asked to actually walk through the video screens in an « incorporation » process of one part of the work. Spectator interactive experience can also be prolonged further through the download of 3 free-of-charge videos from the artist's cell phone site onto the public's individual cell phones.



PROJECT CONCEPTION, DEVELOPMENT AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVES

The prototype of « VIDEOS lustre » presented at SCOPE New York, a fringe exhibition of the Armory Show in Spring 2006, was made possible thanks to a loan of cell phones by a Japanese company and through self-financing by the artist herself.

After having seen this prototype in New York, Dalia LEVIN, Curator of the Herzliya Museum of Tel Aviv, would like to include the finalized version of this installation in the museum's 2007 program, for the « Time » exhibit scheduled to open next Spring.

Numerous institutions like Mac Val, the Maison Rouge - Fondation Antoine de Galbert, the Palais de Tokyo, galleries in both France and internationally, have demonstrated their interest for this installation and are also envisaging the possibility of including it in future programming if the artist and her team find outside financing.

The Herzliya Museum therefore constitutes the very first stage of this artistic adventure and numerous contacts have also been made with art festivals around the world like the Fotofest in Houston, Texas (2008), the Biennale d’Art Contemporain in Montréal (2007), the curators of the LOOP Show in Barcelona, Art Basel Miami and the new Contemporary Art Show in Shanghai.

Achievement of the « VIDEOS lustre » project and its production will depend upon a partnership with one or several business firms.



« VIDEOS lustre »AN INSTALLATION BY BEATRICE VALENTINE AMRHEIN

In this protean and interactive installation, Béatrice Valentine Amrhein offers the visitor a sensorial experience leading to a new relationship with the visible and with space, and takes us back to our own proper apprehension « of the body and of the body system »: « REPORT ON THE BODY and the Body System ».

It's first of all an introspective experience, in a reinterpretation of the living via the multiple videos presented in the installation, close-ups and investigations of the different parts of the body, connected together by a network of cell phones, like some sort of super organism.

These videos function as a developer, revealing the quintessence of the human being, somewhere between appearance and fact, in a pick-up mode where the spectator loses his reference points and finds himself hesitating between fictional images and real images.

It is really a question of the artist redrawing a new map of the skin, this other « spread-out brain », a new territory of the body, in a reconfiguration of the perceptible.

Beyond this, the artist invites the spectator to rediscover his own sensorial nature, inciting him to imagine his own sensual domain, a pretext for calling into question his relationships with the objects and beings that surround him.

"I told myself that I'd start working on video the day that I found a texture"

The visitor is immediately struck by the videos presented in the "VIDEOS lustre" installation by this material that is assimilated to painted material, a pictorial texture obtained by an extreme pixelization of the images.

« The digital language is present everywhere and it's profoundly modified our perception of the body, modified our relationship with our senses of touch and sight, it's transformed our auditory perception in that it modifies the distance and the impact of this distance on the body."

"I chose the cell phone because it has become an extension of the hand and so of the body. It is also an extension of the eye, like a 'third eye", and of the ear, first of all.

An Orwellian illusion, when the artist speaks of intrusion or of it being a question of an everyday object of an apparently grand banality for which we shouldn't, in principle, have any reason to be wary or suspicious. And that's exactly the point. Due to its small size, the cell phone makes it possible to take pictures that a simple numerical camera would not be able to … because it's less discreet, it's more visible … more intrusive.

The introduction of sound tracks for each of the videos permits the contemplation to reach a successful conclusion, insofar as the sound multiplies the receptivity attached to the sense of sight alone, in that it also calls on the spectator's hearing, creating an appeal to the two human senses the most able to provoke an esthetic experience.

An original or even visionary view of the world, and a very personal and surprising point of view.

Olivier Castaing

Art Agent



LUSTRE



« VIDEOS lustre » IN THE WORK OF BVA

When Béatrice Valentine Amrhein is asked to place this installation within the context of her artistic approach, she immediately evokes a piece of clothing.

Is it an allusion to the clothes that she generally wears herself, a sublime play of superposition of different materials, weaves, transparency, like just as many different skins, in a paradoxical game, where modesty and seduction dialogue back and forth together …

Not very probable …These clothes bring to mind a work done on oneself, a work of mourning over somewhat grievous and distressing reminiscences that one abstains from talking about, being too discreet to unveil what clothing creates in terms of distance to sublimate a material, organic, physical casing without ever restraining the body …

This same piece of clothing that a few years ago was the subject of a famous happening with the complicity of the designer Maurizio Altieri, the Carpe Diem brand creator.

A conceptual experience of the artist's body, placed in a container. All data relative to the artist's measurements were recorded at a distance. In the end, a pair of trouser was created, cut out of a white canvas fabric from which the artist would have willingly made a canvas to paint on.

A pair of trousers created from a recording of the exact measurements of her dimensions. And above all, only one seam in this garment … located in the crotch, as if to better affirm her emancipated virility as a committed artist, and with these few words: "I wear these words between my legs ... and the drunken poet raged at the universe …" while at the same time the hidden inner side of the pants, in contact with the body, becomes one with the artist to better capture her intimate impression.

"I wear this pair of trousers when I work, they're my choice and they are contaminated through my way of working. Paint stains and spots and other traces of my work accumulate on the outside of these pants …and I capture this progression at regular intervals on film by a series of photos that I take of this piece of clothing …"

These photos are just so many more materials that will certainly be reintroduced one day in one of her works …

The video is only another medium, just like drawing, painting and photography were before it, in that it takes part in an artistic approach but which still remains only a simple vector of artistic creation.

Olivier Castaing

Agent d'Art



PROTOTYPE PRESENTED AT SCOPE NYC

Presented for the first time in March 2006 at SCOPE New York, in the form of a prototype, this work has been the object of constant reflection on the part of BVA up until it has reached its present form.

This « VIDEOS lustre » sculpture, which gives its name to the installation, closely combines and mixes the specificities of video, photo, painting and sculpture.

A grand chandelier composed of 100 latest-generation multimedia cell phones seems to escape from a braid of black electric cables. An original video with its own proper sound track is presented in continuity on the screen of each of these cell phones. The video image evokes a fundamental subject: the body and the body system. Filmed as close as possible to bodies and around the bodies, this novel, almost pictorial approach tends to recreate all the dimensions possible in an examination of the folds and of the skin of the human body. An audacious premise to draw up a new map of the body where limits are blurred, and to be as near as possible to the subject during the integrality of each of the videos, for a few seconds or more … for several minutes.

The VIDEOS lustre piece generates a remarkably singular and spellbinding tension.

With “VIDEOS LUSTRE” Beatrice Valentine Amrhein’s videos seek to apprehend the body’s texture and nature by giving them another substance. The uncommon nature of those creations is mainly based on the way of auscultation the subjects closed by like giving a focus on an eye which the camera peer into the pleats and the outlines, drawing a kind of new cartography where the limits get blur.

Also with an emphasis of the “pixellization” speaking as much as in the pictures about what is getting into all over in our live and bodies and change the perception an using of some organs

Lee WELLS, chief curator SCOPE NYC



F I L L E S -

I n s t a l l a t i o nG A R CONS

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BEATRICE VALENTINE AMRHEINFILLES-GARCONS

INSTALLATION PROJECT

INSTALLATION

The installation is composed of anthropomorphic light boxes.





INSTALLATION in situ


BEATRICE VALENTINE AMRHEINFILLES - GARCONS

INSTALLATION (2005) ART CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM « LES CORDELIERS » - CHATEAUROUX (France)

R E P O R T

Drawings Paintings

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O N B O D Ya n d t h ebody system



BEATRICE VALENTINE AMRHEINREPORT ON BODY and the body system

Screenshots 3D Simulation



Installation Starret Lehigh Building



June 2005, San Erasmo, Off Venice Biennale



April 2005, Nancy (France)

Beatrice Valentine Amrhein was born in Wassy and grew up on Reunion Island before studying at different prestigious art schools: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (French National College of Fine Arts) in Paris and in Nancy and Parsons School of Design in New York. Trained in the techniques of painting, she created her first large format canvases.

BVA rapidly breathed an organic dimension into her work, where words and forms, fragments of the body and identified or unidentified objects intermingle, jostle or confront each other in a timeless poetic dialogue.

While painting was the origin of BVA's artistic expression, it didn't take long for installations, photography, video and performances to appear in her work as well, opening up whole new fields of experimentation.

The major theme of the « Report on Body and the Body System » that's treated by BVA is thus found in her « laboratory-studio », an original, protean echo necessary for her art.

Béatrice Valentine Amrhein has taken part in numerous group shows, performances and events in France, and the one-woman shows that have been devoted to her work made it possible to show the different forms of her talent in France as well as abroad in Venice, Los Angeles and New York. Her work has also been the object of different public commissions (in the form of sculptures and mural paintings).

She plans to transfer her studio to New York in Autumn 2006.

Béatrice Valentine Amrhein has been working on the « REPORT ON BODY and the Body System » project since 2004.

Rooted in her study and search on the body system, this work combines large-scale drawings and paintings, photos and videos through which traces and impressions of the body matrix can be found. Confronting signs, markers and questions, this work introduces the troubling and evocative themes of birth, creation and introspection that are all common to the human body system.


BEATRICE VALENTINE AMRHEIN

beatrice valentine amrhein flipbook

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