Solo Show "Suite: A Panoramic Video and Sound Canvas by Yannick Jacquet with Music by Thomas Vaquié" at the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery

Nov 9, 2018

The Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery at San José State University
proudly presents "Suite: A Panoramic Video and Sound Canvas by Yannick Jacquet with Music by Thomas Vaquié"

A Solo Show Featuring Artwork by Yannick Jacquet, Curated by Aaron Wilder

"Suite" by Yannick Jacquet

Yannick Jacquet, Suite, 2017-2018, Installation, Looped Video Projection and Immersive Sound


November 13-December 14, 2018

Illustrated Lecture
Yannick Jacquet: Rooted in Resilience
Tuesday November 13, 5:00pm-6:00pm
San José State University
Department of Art and Art History Lecture Hall
Art Building, Room #133

Opening Reception: 
Tuesday November 13, 6:00pm-7:30pm
 

Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery

One Washington Square

San José, CA 95192



Born in Geneva in 1980, Swiss/French digital media artist Yannick Jacquet currently lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. He has spent ten years developing a visual art practice exploring approaches to the reversal of deterioration inherent in our exchanges with the world. From the spectacular to the intimate, his work is consistently rooted in the concept of resilience. Jacquet’s art is work haunted by a discourse on the end of time.

His work has been exhibited globally at museums and galleries including Atsuko Barouh Gallery in Japan, Gallery Bunkier Sztuki in Poland, MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Italy, LKFF Gallery in Belgium, Medrar Gallery in Egypt, and Nardone Gallery in Belgium. Additionally, Yannick Jacquet has created permanent installations in public space such as on Flow, a floating building near the Alexander III Bridge in Paris and in cultural institutions such as PASS Museum in Belgium. His work has also been celebrated more ephemerally at events such as Cervantino International Festival in Mexico, the International Festival of Ancient Greek Drama in Cyprus, Jerusalem Design Week, Mapping Festival in Geneva, Némo Biennale Internationale Des Arts Numériques in Paris, Nuit Blanche Bruxelles in Belgium, and the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

Mécaniques Discursives, Yannick Jacquet’s collaboration with printmaker Fred Penelle received the Milan Design Week Tech Award as part of the Timescapes exhibition in 2014 as well as the Collector’s Prize at the Slick Art Fair in Brussels in 2013. When describing Mécaniques Discursives, he has said “Images can be interpreted in even more ways than words can. Each image can contain within itself many different meanings that can change depending on who looks at it, their age, their background, their culture. The meaning of a word is defined by its own history and the language in which it is written. When you build up images, as we do in Mécaniques Discursives, the possibilities of interpretation are multiplied, opening multiple doors to imagination.”

Yannick Jacquet’s process of visual creation draws on structural elements as disparate as the architecture of the Centre PompidouMetz and a Ravel string quartet. His influences include the Belgian artist Berlinde de Bruyckere’s work on mutations in living matter, the Japanese Ryoichi Kurokawa’s stellar visions, and his fellow Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s sardonic laugh and his 1960s machines designed to self-destruct.

Collaboration is a central element of Jacquet’s practice as he combines his own three-dimensional projection mapping and audio-visual art with unique contributions from practitioners in fields ranging from architecture to illustration to music to technology. Bridging both public and private realms, his sleek and mesmerizing light projections transform surfaces of intimate interior settings and large architectural structures alike.

About his artistic role in mediating and manipulating data, Yannick Jacquet has said “In the twenty-first century, data is the new keystone of our digital society, it underlies all modern economies. Yet unlike machines, data is invisible, even though the infrastructure necessary to run the networks is huge. There are no gears, no pistons, no factories, everything happens inside computers, in anonymous data centers, connected by underground or submarine cables that tend to make us mistakenly believe that digital is free of all physical constraints (cloud computing). While the presence of machines was pervasive, data is invisible and only the work of the (data)designer can reveal its presence." 

Suite is an immersive audio and video installation with music by Thomas Vaquié. Yannick Jacquet developed the first iteration of Suite in 2017 at Constellations in Metz, France. The work has been significantly enhanced and adapted specifically for this exhibition in the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery. Suite is a large and contemplative panoramic video and sound canvas inspired by the principles of repetition often used in minimalist and serial musical constructions. Employing constantly shifting simple graphic elements, his project Suite unfolds through slow evolutions. Fluid mechanics and geometry synthesize to create rich visual complexity bridging a viewer’s contemporary sense of reality to a rhythmic abstract deconstruction of social elements before returning to a holistic sense of presentness and agency. His two-fold research into color and the notions of time and natural cycles has led him to champion a new paradigm of slowness as one possible path to the urgently needed restoration of sensibility.

In conjunction with the opening of this exhibition, Yannick Jacquet will present an illustrated lecture 5:00pm - 6:00pm in the Department of Art & Art History Lecture Hall (room 133) the evening of November 13, 2018, just prior to the opening reception, 6:00pm-7:30pm in the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery. Both events are free and open to the public.

We would like to extend our humblest appreciation to Yannick Jacquet and his studio manager Nicolas Boritch for all their efforts to make this exhibition a success. We would also like to thank San José State University (SJSU) Digital Media Art faculty G. Craig Hobbs, Andrew Blanton, and Rhonda Holberton for their suggestions, support, expertise, and guidance from the earliest stages of this exhibition’s conceptualization to the sourcing and installation of equipment and the integration of Jacquet’s displayed work with multiple learning opportunities for SJSU students.

Curated by Aaron Wilder

 

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