Meryll Hardt

Installation

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To leave one’s shadow is to cease being in the world between the earth and sun, the electric light bulb and the wall. The empty cavities left by the bodies of the inhabitants of Pompeii and the shadows on the ground captured by the view camera in Hiroshima bear witness to our precariousness and to nature’s ability to fix our most everyday moments. In a digital tense flow, the installation refers to the early days of photography, blind gazes of subjects petrified in their patience, the wait to be immortalised. Death is above all an image that is lacking, the end of the tape or return to the start. Navigating between several dimensions, as if teleported, we often say, “I didn’t see the time go by.”

My project came out from a questionning of post-shumanism, man-machine interaction, along which I got interest into biotechnologies of retinal implants. The keystone of the installation is to be found in the dissociation of a screen and its polarising filter that has been removed, a distancing which reveals a LED screen as a monochrome of white light. A path leading to the delay of the image, subject to a gradual, fragile revelation, through a hung filter, as a square lense-prothesis. The installation enables a single visitor or group to experience a movement back and forth between the fixation and dissolution of their form. Each occurrence in the white cube is interconnected and the movement of one affect on the representation of the other on the screen. On a white background, white cube and white light, the installation questions the binary and essentialist revelation of the image.

Meryll Hardt

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Remerciements

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Thomas McIntosh, Eric Prigent, Bertrand Scalabre, Delphine Ménoret, Cécile Picard-Limpens, Laurent Grisoni, l’IRCICA, Johan Lescure, Cyprien Quairiat, Sébastien Cabour, Raphaël Thibault, Raphaël Henard, François Lescieux, David Chantreau, Jean-René Lorand, Olivier Anselot, Aurélie Brouet, Constantin Dubois Choulik, Jules Huvig, Raphaël Holt, Richard Campagne, François Bedhomme, Thierry Maes, Massimiliano Simbula, sans oublier Mark Rothko et Star Trek.