Hôtel Le Lièvre presents a series of two-person fortnightly presentations, in which an artist from the gallery invites another artist to present each a single work, looking to form a meeting ground between different positions. The first iteration of Hôtel Le Lièvre is dedicated to the work of Rochelle Feinstein and Shannon Ebner.
Eugene Atget’s Paris photographs are to Walter Benjamin the first attempt to liberate photography from its portrait tradition, paving the way for a modern disenchanted gaze. The wholesome estrangement he created between man and his environment would become an inspiration for the surrealist avant-garde.
Today our daily environment appears as vacant as in Eugene Atget’s “Art dans le Vieux Paris” series, which includes a number of views of the Hotel Le Lièvre, where the Paris gallery is established. Site of an intense cultural and fashion trade, today the building’s walls witness a disruption of their usual purpose. As an attempt to counter this sense of detachment, Hôtel Le Lièvre presents a series of two-person fortnightly presentations, in which an artist from the gallery invites another artist to present each a single work. The continual dialogues and the rhythmical reconfigurations of the space every two weeks makes the gallery’s walls alive at a time in which the tangible world seems unattainable.
Rochelle Feinstein and Shannon Ebner work with two contrasting artistic mediums that often share similar obsessions, such as their self-reflexivity. The works in Hôtel Le Lièvre participate in the opposition between the non-colours black and white, which account for distinct assumptions in painting and photography. Number One-Twenty Four, 1990, is one of Feinstein's seminal grid works in black and white. Arguing against the authorial and dominant endgame of abstraction, Feinstein creates gestural square fields of paint that blur and obliterate the grid's pristine structure. Combining pictures and written language, Strayer, 2018, evokes a time in the 1990s when, for a few years, Ebner identified more as a poet than an artist. The work introduces ideas of circularity, movement and transformation across photographic, typographic and linguistic forms, traversing different fields of writing.
Rochelle Feinstein has developed an oeuvre that probes the cultural and political implications of art making, and painting in particular, through an approach that could be described as self-conscious abstraction. Ambiguity and humour accompany Feinstein’s artistic approach. Based on autobiographical experiences, value systems that determine our everyday life but also politics or art history are shifted into absurdity. Feinstein scrutinises the formal repertoire of abstract painting, as well as her own positioning as an artist within the structures of art production and the art market. One of the key aspects of Feinstein's early works from the 1990s’ is the reinterpretation of the modernist grid. Symbol of artistic autonomy, Feinstein uses the grid as a tool to deconstruct its authority and integrate the elements it was supposed to eradicate: lived experience, political criticism, humour.
Shannon Ebner probes both the visual and audible tonalities of communication through her photography, sculpture, installation, and video. The various compositions of Ebner’s writing imbue new understandings into the depicted words through pushing boundaries of form in diverse modes such as her photographic essays. This type of volition finds the artist traversing through different fields of writing. Strayer, 2018 is from a body of work entitled A GRAPHIC TONE, which introduces ideas of circularity, movement and transformation across photographic, typographic and linguistic forms of representation. The project continues Ebner's research in the idea of a long-form poem or photographic essay as formats for writing across different spaces over extended periods of time.
