Art is never
the object alone.
Anne-Laure Lemaitre shapes places
where makers and viewers belong.
Living is unexceptional. You get one try and mostly fuck it up. There are periods of my life where I spend most of the day wishing people dead. Not being able to get out of bed before 3 p.m. Feeling against all logic that I am pissing it all away. Nothing is ever enough; I am never close enough to THE THING. I want to make a slit in the belly of THE THING and string it up by its THING feet and skin it like I’m pulling the sweater over the head of a young child and wrap myself inside its dripping THING skin.
I want or need to commit this shearing to get close to myself. Because I lose track of the shape of myself, I have to throw myself at my own edge. Sometimes I want a drink so bad that I want to jump out a window. A physical itch: when I drink, my demon gets to come out. When I drink, I go feral. The walls that make no sense, they fall away; I do not have to worry about the teeth marks left in the disembodied arms of people I might have loved who I wanted so badly to love me. When you go feral there is somewhere for the force to go; you send it into the pendulum that is other people who don’t love you well enough. Then a bungee cord of debt brings you back. Without the promise of release at the edge—? You throw your weight around with nowhere to go. And then where do you put it?
Catalina Ouyang
Catalina Ouyang’s practice broadens a plural understanding of self as conduit for sociopolitical projections and as transient vessel for perceptive biases. Probing the viability of affirmational coalition-making in their embrace of contradiction, Ouyang’s works collate periclitating inner visions of grief, longing, and fury with acts of mending. Limbs and overgrowths are grafted tenderly onto quotidian items, the phenomenology of which remains in constant questioning (see risk assessment (by what love have I)). These hybrid objects belong at the cusp of language, where words are mute, relegated to their innate restrictive nature.
Ouyang’s recurring ciphers include dogs, hybrid creatures, wolves, Medusa, Ophelia, and other popular villains and victims. Anne, a set of three ballpoint pen drawings of Anne Sexton, takes up the poet as one such cipher, representing a terminal point from which the horrors conferred by one’s ancestors endure. Ouyang and Sexton intersect at a nexus of addiction, mental illness, and familial trauma. Their artistic and autobiographical relation teases the edge of annihilation, where love manifests so intensely that it erupts cruelly in self-implosion.
Deleuze wrote in his essay “The Fold” about calculus, inflection points, and quantum spaces, but also about the soul, faith, and God. Ouyang embraces this territory of the ecstatic and unhinged, or as their friend and collaborator Marit Liang articulated, the “states of mania in which the artist finds their rapture” reside, where this sinew dementedly binds one generation to another.
Confronting the legacy of tough matrilineal love, Ouyang reimagines in Terrariums I to IV the lotus feet of their great-grandmother, hand-carved in alabaster, soapstone, and wonderstone. Foot binding in China was a mutilating yet sacred act shared between a mother and daughter. Ouyang’s sculpted relics become prosopopoeia: incarnations of the feminine body as object of desire, shaped into property and an erotic nationalistic imaginary.
Ouyang’s sculpture otherwise, spite: 1. whores at the end of the world / 2. from every drop of his blood another demon arose (1829-1840) reinterprets a propagandist nineteenth-century cartoon as fabricated by British colonial powers to justify their stronghold in India: alleged Indian “thugs” murder innocents at a well. The title’s structure derives from Duchamp’s Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage, which itself evokes Courbet’s L’Origine du monde in the victimized posture of its faceless subject. What Courbet saw as ushering in a new era of “truth” and realism in art was complicated by the misogynistic undercurrent of its voyeur’s gaze.
Positioning their practice in a preternatural state of belonging, Ouyang’s work embraces the equivocal state in which the social and the self collide. Ouyang’s visions are neither didactic nor monolithic; they evolve abstrusely with their maker. Startling and torturous, they are at times soft and tender. Ouyang’s quest—beyond the cynical— into the underbelly of the unspeakably wounded and the inherently flawed, in fact, lunges toward chasmic grace.
Photo: Alexander Laurent Rubalcava
Anne-Laure Lemaitre is a curator, writer, and producer based in New York, Paris, and the Nova Scotia wilderness. Her practice begins by questioning a territory: its physical and emotional dimensions, its history, its context, its belonging, before turning to the art it calls for. This orientation has shaped a body of work spanning the most experimental corners of the emerging art world and leading corporations and public institutions.
Many artists she has worked with early in their careers have since gone on to significant critical and market recognition. Those relationships rarely end with the exhibition. For several, she remains a resource: someone to think with, exchange with, workshop with.
For nearly twenty years, she has worked across scales and contexts: from intimate solo exhibitions at artist-run spaces to permanent public commissions, from single-artist career conversations to cultural programs spanning five continents. Her practice is built around the specific rather than the repeatable, treating the space, the institution, the sidewalk, and the online environment each as curatorial material in its own right.
Lemaitre writes regularly about art for catalogues, publications, and for herself. Her writing, whether commissioned or not, tends toward the felt rather than the prescribed: a belief that how we speak about a practice, and what it does to us, shapes how it is seen and received.
Intentional art programs · Site-specific commissions
Curatorial strategy · International practice
Art In Context is a curatorial production practice whose work ranges from international public commissions, corporate collections and multi-venue cultural strategies to ongoing collaborations with artists, brands and cultural institutions.
Every project begins with the same questions: what does this place need, what story belongs here, and who should tell it. That orientation shapes everything from artist selection and fabrication to the logic of how a program holds together in one location or across multiple sites.
Drawing on nearly twenty years of work, Art In Context has built the infrastructure to operate anywhere and at any scale. An extensive network of creative partners allows it to move from a single commission to a coordinated program spanning dozens of sites without losing the specificity that makes a project land. Art In Context works worldwide.