12.10.-4.11.2012
HIPPOLYTE STUDIO
Yrjönkatu 8–10 (courtyard), 00120 Helsinki, Finland
+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi
Open: Tue–Fri 12–17, Sat–Sun 12–16
Opening on Thursday October 11, 5–7 p.m. Welcome!
The main feature of Christelle Mas’ art is her fascination, even passion, for food. With amazing attention and interest, she observes its texture, measures its weight and studies its transparency. It can soon be understood that behind this aesthetic pleasure there is mistrust, worry, even paranoia. What if our relationship with food was the proof that we are inferior to it? What if hunger was the symptom of a chronical illness characterised by this need ? Would it be the proof of vegetables and animals’ hegemony over human beings?
The most ordinary things can become the most worrying ones. Giving in to an artistic delirium embodied in a paranoiac conviction of the worst, though sustained by a rationality that she never lets go, this young artist shows the danger that threatens us in her colourful images.
We can see that Christelle Mas’s art remains on the fringes of fiction. She does not see danger as an entertaining fear with a suspense effect, but as something real. Her exaggeration of danger is sometimes playful or naive, but never escapist. It is no Orphic trip through the looking glass. The artist’s commitment to reality makes her interested in the tangible, yet ambiguous world of applied science.
– Benjamin Riado, philosopher and PhD student at the University Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne (aesthetics and art sciences)
Christelle Mas (b. 1984, France) lives and works in Oulu, Finland. She has a master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Sorbonne, Paris. Since 2005 she has been researching food, especially its negative aspects, with her art. Besides taking photographs Mas also works with installations, videos, poems and drawings. Beginning in 2012 she has been teaching a course on creative photography at Oulu-opisto. In addition to exhibitions held in Finland Christelle Mas has also had exhibitions in France, Germany, Canada and Belgium.
For more information and press images, please contact:
Petronella Grönroos, exhibition co-ordinator / Photographic Gallery Hippolyte +358 9-612 33 44, firstname.lastname@hippolyte.fi
Mas, Oyster, 2007