I had wanted to visit this pretty gallery on rue des Jardins Saint Paul for a long time since I met its owner Valérie Anne Giscard d’Estaing at an art fair… Her choice of photographers is always fun and this new exhibition with Patty Caroll, the Chicago born artist, really made me laugh. The director of the gallery Camille Reynard discovered her work at “Les Rencontres photographiques d’Arles” and offered her this show. Her vision of women’s work at home is hilarious and very uplifting.
We have all lived through these dramatic moments of wanting to prepare a large dinner and not knowing how to start, or wanting to clean our desk and having no energy to throw everything away. Patty Carroll who is an art teacher and has spent most of her career in Chicago with a few stints at the Royal College of Art in London,, in Pennsylvania and in Texas, is obviously a very fun character. She characterizes this series as “a labor of love and anguish”…
She creates “imaginary, humorous worlds that critique and satirize claustrophobic expectations of women’s domestic perfection; an unending but frustrating endeavor”. “My photographs are metaphors for the interior life of women; how we substitue everyday objects and artifice and turn them into obsessions”. All the photographs are elaborately constructed in the studio for the camera life size. The room where the scene is created is an 8 X 8 foot box.
Until March 25, Galerie XII, 14 rue des Jardins Saint Paul, Paris 4.
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