Valérie Snobeck at 8, rue Saint-Bon, Paris
19 November–11 December 2010, Paris
Valérie Snobeck, Curtain, 2010, ceramic, glaze, permament marker, mirror dust, parrot feather from a French philosopher, hardware, peeled prints on plastic
Valérie Snobeck at 8 rue Saint-Bon
Valerie Snobeck works by dismantling her materials. She takes a mirror, and then through processes that include acids, scrapping, cutting and rubbing, she rips the metal backing off the surface, resulting in translucent panes of glass, with only subtle traces of their past lives as mirrors. The results are fragile yet sharp pictorial planes covered and graced by metallic shades and shadows, and revealing moment of opacity, translucence and reflection.
Snobeck unravels many other mediums as well, both classical and those relating to more contemporary technologies. She uses materials like mirrors, marble, wood, paint, and ceramic, and simultaneously engages them in present day standards of reproduction and fabrication including commercial printing, laminating machines, and digital processors. Nets are cast to contain our productions of meaning in the forms of exhibitions, books, buildings, dinner parties, and so on. The sea eats away and abstracts the compositions we form. Decay stills and disrupts the sequence of inscribed information as meaning shifts towards the only constant; the perception of material processes, of what we build and what we build from. Reversing versions on a forward motion. Snobeck’s operations are a clash between alchemy and appliance.
