The Isabelle Gounod Gallery is pleased to present the first exhibition of Anne-Sophie Cochevelou. French artist based in London, Anne-Sophie Cochevelou offers a reflection on the cultural appropriation within an “unplanned obsolescence” - through a maximalism that is dear to her, thus celebrating the richness and variety of different cultures through reclaimed material.
As a visual artist and performer she develops an everyday aesthetics of the ornament, of the accumulation that gives shape to exuberant and improbable creations, which explore the concept of wearable art and uphold a “hyper-femininity feminism”.
The artist questions the female body within the post-modern society and particularly the paradoxes of feminism through a costume-based performance. The dress, made of a crinoline on which are sewn hundreds of trouser-dressed Barbie legs, is conceived as both an installation and a performance medium. The public is invited to add or remove elements from the installation, in order to customise it. The performance plays on the ambiguity of a striptease between unveiling and preserving. The final work, which is suspended within the exhibition space, has become the meeting point of two practices: that of the artist and that of the audience, who can create their own design works through the possibility of this interaction.
Anne-Sophie Cochevelou prepares her work using a series of elements she recuperates from bargain hunting at flea markets or at car boots sale. These are then assembled to give shape to creations and theatrical enactments, which are inspired by a baroque imagination. At the gallery, the artist has captured Japanese, Chinese, American-Indian and also Moris cultural symbols, which she changes into fashionable objects celebrating a cultural eclecticism. And thus is how she pins a kimono to the wall, which is quite literally “something that one wears themselves” - kiru and mono in Japanese - onto which she embroiders some Moshi’s Monsters, an emblem of contemporary Japanese culture kawaii and Manga. This kimono becomes a narrative garment, complete with revisited symbols. A series of ornaments that have been turned into headdresses and neckpieces are in position, to be critically analysed by our society. An American-Indian headdress denounces the genocide perpetrated by the settlers at the time of conquering America, whilst a breastplate, representing the four ages of the woman, reminds us of the ineluctable of our fate.
Anne-Sophie Cochevelou conceives the world as a vast stage and has this very singular gift to dramatize the objects that surround it.
