Off site / "#followmoistp" Gwendal Coulon’s residency at Évariste Galois secondary school (Paris 13th arrondissement). September 2023 to June 2024.
Curator: Elena Lespes Muñoz
with the support of Susie Richard
Gwendal Coulon, Petite fenêtre sur le monde, watercolor on paper, 65 x 50 cm, 2021 galerie Gaudel de Stampa, Paris
Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok... there are many social networks that are part of our daily lives today, particularly of young teenagers through their use of smartphones. They chat, exchange photos and videos, voice their opinions, share their daily lives, get training and information through tutorials, for example. Their infatuation with these networks is not insignificant, and while the media and health professionals have rightly portrayed the risks and excesses, it has to be said that the "it was better before" attitude does not help to understand or raise awareness among young people of what they are doing and experiencing on the web. With this project, Gwendal Coulon proposes to use social networks as a medium and support for artistic and critical experimentation. Through practice, dialogue and misappropriation, the aim is to use one of these media to question its use, both individually and collectively, and to explore its creative potential.
Photos, videos, statuses, profiles, hashtags, POV (Point of View) ... allow young teens to express, test and probe multiple facets of themselves, while feeling part of a community. Telling one’s story, playing up one’s identity, measuring one’s popularity, assessing one’s place in a peer group and beyond ... are just as much issues common to social networks as, more broadly, to the construction of self in adolescence. Through a series of workshops and visits, the artist and participants will work together to create an avatar: this fictitious, highly anonymous character will be the result of a collective, plural cross-dressing, as well as the group’s many exchanges and experiments. It will be a tool designed and created for and by the group to examine and test its relationship with social networks.
A veritable digital masquerade, it will be first and foremost a way of experiencing JOMO (Joy of missing out), as opposed to FOMO (fear of missing out), which has long characterized the feeling of inferioritý of social network users who feel that, unlike the lives seen and liked on the social media, their own is dull and boring. It’s a question of analyzing and freeing ourselves from the idealized lives portrayed by the networks, and instead choosing to slow down and listen to our own needs. Different trends, #memes and remixes, via sport, fashion and music, will be critically and inventively invested by the group with the aim of thinking about this avatar, its identity and its fictitious life; all with humor, generosity, exaggeration, artificiality, theatricality and even eccentricity.
This project is carried out in partnership with the Évariste Galois secondary school (Paris, 13 e) and the Action collégien program of the City of Paris, as part of the Art Pour Grandir artistic residencies in middle schools, and is supported by la Ville de Paris.
Gwendal Coulon, Social Mood Week, 2020.Pvc and scotch tape lightbox, ink on fabric, stainless steel, medium variable dimensions. View of the exhibition "Social Mood Week", solo show, galerie Grand Verre. photo: Yuan Yue
Gwendal Coulon is a visual artist. Born in 1990, he lives and works in Marseille. His practice, be it performance, painting, text, drawing, sculpture, editorial project, installation or video, is undoubtedly a step aside, or rather a nose-thumbing. His proposals are never really intended to be cynical or deceptive; on the contrary, they tend to reveal certain conventions of the artistic gesture. Through shifts, references and detour, he tricks the conditions of the pictorial act and the visibility of painting, while inscribing poetic elements. Between reiterating and dramatizing the cultural codes cultivated by those involved in art and society in general, he seeks to reveal the flaws and staging of the artist as a social figure.
After studying music at the Conservatoire and the University of Musicology in Rennes and an undergraduate degree at the École Européenne Supérieure de l’Image in Angoulême, Gwendal Coulon graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2019 with honors. Winner of the Prix de Sculpture/Installation des Fondations des Beaux-Arts de Paris, he joins the Frac Poitou-Charentes Collection in 2021 and the CNAP graphic arts collection in 2023. His work has been presented at galerie Gaudel de Stampa (Paris), Crédac center d’art contemporain d’Ivry-sur-Seine, galerie Air de Paris, La Station (Nice), CAC Brétigny, Fondation Ricard (Paris), Fondation Martell (Cognac), hTh CDN Montpellier, and in several festivals and concert halls in France and abroad.
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