Genesis Belanger: Blow Out at Perrotin Paris,
October 17 – December 15, 2022
Blow Out, the title for Genesis Belanger’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, features all-new mixed-media sculptures as well as works on paper that narrate a metastoryline about high-living heartbreak. Belanger has fashioned three linked mise-en-scènes —a closeout sale, banquet hall, and operating room—turning the gallery into a Surrealist theatre. Each chamber is designed to dramatize an outtake on the title’s many-sided meanings.
Belanger’s practice at large is centered on the creation of sculptural objects and tableaux that perform narratives about gender and power. With subject matter informed by centuries of visual culture, from advertising and comics to art history, her magnetic and moody objects traffic in hyper-capitalist torment. She weaponizes glamour and humor to survey an image-possessed present. Her content and approach are informed by art movements, from the Baroque, Pop art and Surrealism, to Chicago Imagism, as well as her professional experiences inside the fashion industry. She hand-builds her objects from flat patterns carved out of clay sheets rolled out as a slab. Sometimes she combines them with furniture of her own invention. She never uses glazes but pigments her clay bodies with powdered tints whisked in with a kitchen mixer. Her palette is soft and honeyed and flaunts a midcentury air.
Over time, her installations have become more complex as her narratives have grown thornier. She composes spaces where time is suspended, intensified, and tangible, riffing on waiting areas, hospital rooms, funeral parlors, and banquet halls. Her vanitas symbolism spotlights aspiration and deceit to expose the hidden extremes dwelling inside everyday objects we consume, wear, and carry.
Visitors to Blow Out move through Belanger’s world building in discreet interiors designed to unfold like acts in an absurd play. The first scene is a deserted “discount store.” Three ceramic and powder coated steel sculptures impersonate a shopping cart, retail shelf, and vending machine—avatars for the bubbles and busts of the American dream. Ironically titled Healthy Living is a gleaming pushcart brimming with a surplus of phallic goods: a soda pop baring a writhing tongue, an open container of milk with a flaccid straw, a saggy asparagus bunch, a hot dog in a bun, and a potted cactus. Impulse Buy debuts Belanger’s latest experimentations in the studio: wall mounted dioramas with personalized cameos. Replete with handmade tiles, it parades condiments, sweets, and a woman’s manicured hand and shoe. The room’s centerpiece is a life-size bubble gum machine, Three for One. Its sunny demeanor masks a darker yarn about illogical aspirations and washed-up ambitions.
The next room reveals the debauched remains of a decadent party. A reposing nude in pieces lounges on a shapely upholstered teal chaise. Lavish flower arrangements, a succulent orange plant, and a pair of table lamps in a frilly chemise flank the extravagant mess of a spilled bowl of fruit sailing on a magic carpet. A dejected neurotic is personified in a sequence of wall-mounted dioramas resembling miniaturized stages that amplify Belanger’s scale shifts on repeat throughout the show. A downcast head and a hand clutching a shattered mirror is encircled by prescription drugs, deflated balloons, and fancy candies. A busted outlet overstuffed with king-size adaptors dangles a pair of fried wires. A chorus of four big-chested ladies, headless and prettily bloused, flank the room. Did they just leave the party or are they trying to get in?
