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Lisa Tan: Two Birds, Eighty Mountains, and a Portrait of the Artist

Presented by Arthouse at the Jones Center at Arthouse at the Jones Center

January 15-March 27, 2011

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Based in Stockholm and New York, Lisa Tan creates visually spare and seemingly restrained, yet emotionally rich works that reveal the nuanced complexities of intimacy, longing and loss. The works in Two Birds, Eighty Mountains, and a Portrait of the Artist, including a project made specifically for Arthouse, address a diverse group of real individuals including the postwar French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, and even the artist herself.

 

Two Birds

In an intimate projected video installation, inspired by the storyline and aesthetic style of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film Le Samouraï, Tan’s Les Samouraïs (2010), focuses on a caged finch, which serves as the protagonist’s sole companion and a central character in Melville’s muted and solemn film, and which tragically died in a studio fire shortly before the film’s completion. In her installation, Tan memorializes the bird, but abates its starkly solitary existence by adding another bird to its cage—a simple gesture to foil the film’s metaphoric evaluation of isolation.

 

Tan’s commemoration of the finch’s peripheral, yet nonetheless poignant existence establishes the trajectory for the artist’s latest project created for Arthouse, an ongoing series of prints made from letters written by Joséphine de Forget to her life-long friend and former lover Eugène Delacroix. The letters, written over several decades, reveal an enduring affection which illuminates a forgotten figure tangentially connected to an icon of French Romantic painting. The warmth and banality of their correspondence bespeaks a familiar intimacy that surely shaped their respective lives, but which went unnoticed until now, as Tan asserts the inherent poetics of Mme de Forget’s unforgettable name.

 

Eighty Mountains

National Geographic (2009), a dual slide projection, presents a coupling of appropriated images that are attached yet interminably separate. One set shows a series of landscape photographs—specifically, romantic images of mountains—clipped from vintage issues of National Geographic and that once belonged to the artist’s late father. A corresponding set of slides shows the reverse side of the clipping, literalizing a metaphoric passage from the front of the mountain to its other side.

 

A Portrait of the Artist

Letters From Dr. Bamberger, begun in 2001, the work-to-date consists of nine sets of letters Tan and her successive romantic partners have received following annual physical exams performed by her general physician. While emphasizing her concern for the well-being of herself and her lovers, the artist also deftly addresses the slippery definition of intimacy and care through a textual portrait of her relationship with her doctor—who possesses intimate knowledge of her physical being—and of her relationship with her respective partners who also know her intimately, but in markedly different ways.