Dove Allouche: Negative Capability

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Dove Allouche, "Perle_28," 2018

courtesy the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc. New York / Paris

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in a public gallery in North America by French artist Dove Allouche. Developed in collaboration with Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry - le Credac, France, this exhibition comprises a variety of new and recent bodies of work with the aim of tracing correlations and connections across the artist’s expansive practice. Encompassing CAG’s two large gallery spaces, over twenty works will be displayed from nine series produced between 2009-2018.

The exhibition presents an investigation into Allouche’s desire not to produce new things in the world, but rather to make visible that which otherwise remains unseen, hidden or buried. The artists’ practice is fundamentally concerned with the materials of the earth and the slow passage of time. Exploring subjects such as the surface of the sun, Parisian sewer networks, stalagmites and the growth of spores, his works demonstrate the effects of such natural events which are often obscured from human view.

Allouche works predominantly with photographic and reprographic processes, using a variety of techniques invented in the 1800’s. The Pétrographie series (2015), for example, employs a technique invented in 1828 by a Scottish physicist who used crystal cut from calcite to dramatically improve a microscope’s power. For the series, Allouche loaned a 117,000 year old length of stalagmite from Belgium’s Remouchamps caves, cutting thin slices through the calcite and then treating each layer as a photographic negative.

Les petrifiantes II (2014) is a series of ambrotypes taken inside natural cave structures. The ambrotype (or collodion positive process) was invented in the mid-nineteenth century and briefly replaced the daguerreotype in popularity until the tintype was introduced. Each ambrotype is a unique original, created by exposing a plate coated in iodized collodion and dipped in silver nitrate. These images of stalactites and stalagmites are created by taking long exposures inside the caves and developed in complete darkness, capturing the slow process of petrification that produced the pictured specimens.

Deversoirs d’orage (2009) is a series of fourteen heliogravures on paper taken of the Paris sewer system, revealing a man-made subterranean world that slowly evolved through two centuries of mineral deposits. The heliogravure is the oldest procedure for producing photographic images and involves a photochemical process to etch an image into a copper plate which is then heated to fuse resin dust to the metal.

Fungi (2016) is a depiction of a species of spores taken from the Museum of Natural History in Paris, which predate human presence on earth. By blowing them through a pipette onto plates, Allouche fostered their growth and at a particular point in their development, photographed them. Similarly, the newest body of work in the exhibition, Perle (2018), presents organic forms of calcite formed and found in shallow cave pools. Like the Pétrographie works, Allouche’s “cave pearls” were sliced into thin films, polished and used as photographic negatives.

Both the Perle and Fungi series’ were printed as photolithographs, which Allouche fitted into frames carved from a singular block of wood and set behind hand-blown crown glass. The act of glassblowing mirrors the act of blowing the spores into the petri dish while the organically formed glass echoes the delicate rondelles of the fungi and the pearls themselves.

The title of the exhibition refers to a phrase first used by the poet John Keats to characterize a writers’ capacity to pursue an artistic vision, despite the fact that it may lead them into intellectual uncertainty and doubt. Negative Capability describes a willingness to dwell in a prolonged state of “not knowing,” which is crucial to Allouche’s artistic process.

Produced in collaboration with the Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry - le Crédac

Generously supported by Institut Francais and the Consulat général de France à Vancouver

Bio

Born in Paris in 1972, Dove Allouche has received international honors including a recent collaboration with the CRCC (the Centre for Research on Collection Conservation) and CIRVA (the International Glass Research Centre, Marseilles), Villa Médicis in Rome (2011-2012) and grants from Villa Médicis-Hors les Murs (to work in Venezuela, 2006) and Programme à la carte (Norway, A.F.A.A, 2002). His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues including gb agency, Paris (2018); Peter Freeman, Inc., New York (2017); Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris, (2013); and Nomas Foundation, Rome (2012) and has been included in many group exhibitions including Paysages Cosmorphes, IAC, Villeurbanne, France (2017); The Sun Placed in the Abyss, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, (2016-2017); Double Take, Drawing Room, London (2016), Sublime, les tremblements du monde, Centre Pompidou Metz (2016); Réinventons le monde, Sala Relalde, Bilbao, (2013), Les détours de l’imaginaire, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012), La commande contemporaine de la Chalcographie du Louvre, Musée du Louvre, Paris (2012) and Estudio Abierto, Palacio de Correos, Buenos Aires (2006). He is represented by Peter Freeman Inc., New York and gb agency, Paris.