Kate Newby
Otium #4
Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes
29 May – 11 August

The IAC, placing research at the heart of its activities, occasionally presents itself as a place of Otium, an interval which favors thinking, meditation and awareness. The gardens, like the interior spaces, are thus opened up in order to initiate a different space-time.

Otium #4 groups together solo exhibitions by three artists from the same generation, coming from three continents: Leone Contini, Maria Laet and Kate Newby.

With simple and measured gestures, these artists share their desire to initiate other ways of being, in porosity with the environment, to which they accord their attention and their care. They propose a re-centering, an intake of breath, more often than not in connection with the earth, somewhere between germination, collection and reparation. In this slowed down temporality, Leone Contini, Maria Laet and Kate Newby, work to initiate or re-establish links between humans and things, often the most ordinary, that are no longer looked at or that can no longer be seen. Their practice is synonymous with organicity and the infra-thin.

Viewed from a cosmomorphical* standpoint, these three exhibitions propose artworks that, similar to “cosmo-gestures”, lead to the transformation of our relationship with the world.

* As an alternative to the anthropomorphic schema that marks our modern Western civilization, cosmomorphic thought represents the world as a relation, apart from any dichotomy and category. Introduced by the anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt and reactivated by the philosopher Pierre Montebello, it is based on the co-activity that mobilizes each of the actors of the cosmos, by decentering and widening our perception. A cosmomorphic world is driven by a process in continuous motion, each term of which is inseparable. It thus repositions the human as an integral actor of the environment in which he lives.