Trampoline supports the group exhibition A Form to Accommodate the Mess featuring the works of artists Hélène Baril, Paul Brunet, Corentin Canesson, Camille Girard, Sarah Holveck, Florence Taburet, TNHCH, and Marine Wallon at Personal Space in Vallejo, USA.
In the mid 1960s, Samuel Beckett famously asserted that the artist’s task is to find a form to accommodate the mess of modern life. Beckett’s comment was an adroit response to the anxieties of his time ; a moment of particular angst fueled by the global fall out from World War II, the American War in Vietnam, the rise of globalization and hypercapitalism, the growth of the military industrial complex, and the spread of countercultural movements. Modernity had particular kinds of messes to contend with, yes, but life on planet Earth is messy, and artists have always helped the rest of us decipher or at least try to make some sense of the mess that is our world.
A form to accommodate the mess takes Beckett’s notion as a starting point. The exhibition features the work of artists who not only accommodate, but distinctly articulate the mess of the world, the mess in our minds, the messiness of day-to-day existence through a diverse range of practices that center drawing as a method and a tool, a beginning and an end.
The exhibition features the work of artists based in France and the Bay Area and is the result of an ongoing dialogue between curators, Canesson and Stevens – one living in France, the other in California.
