Art is never
the object alone.
Anne-Laure Lemaitre shapes places
where makers and viewers belong.
Memories are never linear. They are fugitive amalgams of intertwined moments of significance and uncanny details we remember through the prism of our past and current feelings. Often, elements will blend to create the cohesive intimate language and dream-like architecture that in part will feed our understanding of ourselves.
Luján Pérez’s work explores this undefined space where scenes and objects become more than their representation alone. Her large scale works on paper, mix of printmaking, painting and drawing, are in-between territories made vessels that evoke how dreams, thoughts and memories blend and associate to enhance the map of our subconscious.
Every work presented in Your Nostalgia Created a Non-Existing Country dialogues with the next. Common elements change scale or are displaced, taking the main stage or becoming trivial background details. Each composition is a gathering of inspirations and life moments (iPhone images, a piece of gum under a table, an embrace, a craigslist ad, a bad joke) which combine into innermost evocative visions of fantasized moments; a dinner table from the point of view of a five years old, a tender exchange of an imagined flower, a surface on which a series of little horses built of stone are resting, the intimacy felt in looking at a loved one’s toes wiggling.
A nomad since the age of 5, Luján Pérez has developed due to the constant urgency of a life adrift a keen sense of adaptability, assimilation, presence and a need to approach every situation, relationship or experience with an equivalent sense of preciousness and seriousness. From her disconnection anxiety and eternal yearning of belonging blossomed a deep connection to nature as a means to root oneself. Plants are an ongoing motif in Pérez’s practice. Their properties become symbols, hints to the deeper cycles and mechanisms by which we all abide. In this series, cuttings loosely inspired by the common toxic houseplant yellow oleander are rising from the silhouettes of the Spanish pots which surrounded Pérez as she grew. These flowers act as a common thread between each piece, but also become through their beauty yet toxicity a greater metaphor of the complexity at the core of life itself where trauma, love, celebration, pain and hope coexist.
Drawing from the inherent qualities in Pérez’s work, Your Nostalgia Created a Non-Existing Country complements the etherealness so intrinsically present in her practice. Gradient grey walls and small sculptures disseminated around the gallery immerse further the viewer in its evanescence while an induced light air flow allows for the pieces, hung away from the walls using sculptural fixtures, to move subtly, enhancing the evocative and fleeting nature of their subject.
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.