Valérie Mréjen
Past Artist In Residence
2001

Writer, visual and video artist, Valérie Mréjen seeks out ways to evoke the strange emptiness behind our words through manipulation of dialogue in videos that present images from everyday life and relationships.

She is the author of three books: She wrote Mon grand-père in 1999, which she followed with the photography exhibit L’Appartement de Mon Grand-Pere in 2000; in 2001 she wrote the autobiographical novel L’agrume concerning the loneliness of love, which received the Second Novel Prize in France that year; and Eau Sauvage, written in 2004. She was asked to make a film about contemporary life in Tel Aviv and presented Pork and Milk at an art gallery there in 2002.

Valérie Mréjen presented Filmed portraits (14 memories), a series she started at 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica (2001) to answer the self-posed question: how do you make someone’s portrait? She wanted to capture the surprise of the first glance, while scrutinizing this landscape we call L.A. By filming people in a context familiar to them (both indoors and outdoors), she extracted a story from the footage of their memories.