serial consign

[grégory chatonsky / dislocation III - 003 / 2007]

Although I've been aware of his work for a while, I had never had really combed through Grégory Chatonsky's portfolio until yesterday. Networked Performance tipped me off about an upcoming NYC solo show by this multimedia artist that seems rather intriguing. The Invention of Destruction will take place at Galerie Poller this spring/summer (May 8th through July 5th) and is dedicated to exploring "the increasing aesthetization of destruction."

Grégory Chatonsky was born and educated in France and has up until recently been splitting his time between Paris and Montreal. His body of work is quite varied, but he seems rather dedicated to producing stark, provocative imagery across a variety of mediums (including sculpture, photo collage and web based work), he is also a founding member of the net.art collective incident.net.

The image above is from the third iteration of his Dislocation Series, which features an entire suite of "disintegration studies" of decaying asphalt and pavement. These works find a tension through the conflicting geometries of cracked pavement and arrhythmic swaths of negative space which creep in from the edge of each frame. While the subject matter of Dislocation III is urban, Dislocation II investigates the decay of office furniture and domestic objects. The content and tone of this work reminds me of Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson and Felix Schramm. Fans of infrastructural and architectural snuff art should also note the excellent archive of Paul Virilio's Unknown Quantity which was hosted by the Fondation Cartier in 2002-2003.

Chatonsky has also dedicated a significant portion of his artistic output to recontextualizing the narrative of iconic films. The above image is a still from a deadpan 2007 video piece called Vertigo@home which reimagines the infamous Vertigo Tour of San Francisco as taking place through Google's Street View.

This image is from 1=1 which riffs off the abundance of doppelgängers in David Lynch's Lost Highway. The interactive piece takes the fractured narrative of Lynch's dark reading of Los Angeles and expands it into an outright double feature.

Grégory Chatonsky's work is most certainly worth examining and if you find yourself in NYC this summer check out The Invention of Destruction.