Hélène Cixous Reading Group

As part of Alexandra Grant’s upcoming exhibition Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest, opening June 1, 2013 at 18th Street Art Center, Cixous Reading Group will meet regularly and is open for participation.

The Hélène Cixous reading group’s next meeting is Sunday, March 24, facilitated by Robert Nashak and Alexandra Grant. For our 6th meeting we’re going to read the essay “The Last Painting or Portrait of God,” which is in the collected book of essays, “Coming to Writing” available here: Cixous – Coming to Writing and Other Essays.

We are meeting Sunday, March 24th from 4-6pm at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena.

Tea and cookies will be served.

Parking is available for free for 90 minutes in the Marriott garage directly north of the Armory.  After that it’s $2 for 30 minutes to a maximum of $6.  There is street parking as well.

The Cixous reading group coincides with the Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest, a participatory art project by 18th Street’s upcoming Lab Artist Grant in collaboration with Hélène Cixous to take place jointly at 18th Street Arts Center (Santa Monica) and Mains d’Oeuvres (Saint Ouen) in 2013.  This multi-dimensional project, which includes a residency component and contributions by both Los Angeles-based and Paris-based artists, is presented from April 15 to June 28, 2013 at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, CA and from September 6 to October 20, 2013 at Mains d’Oeuvres in Saint-Ouen, France. Pilar Tompkins Rivas, Curator and Director or Residency Programs at 18th Street Arts Center, and Isabelle Le Normand, Curator of Visual Arts at Mains d’Oeuvres, are co-organizers of this project.

Several years ago, the iconic French author, poet, playwright and philosopher Hélène Cixous gave Alexandra Grant one of her books, Philippines, as a source for imagery and entreated the artist to make work about the concepts present in the text.  Philippines is based around the story of Peter Ibbetson, a novel by Georges du Maurier, where two childhood friends are separated by class and country and reunite as adults in their shared dream-life.  The themes of Philippines are often paired: dreaming and reality; telepathy and empathy; the “perfect other;” the shape of two nuts found in a single mandorla or almond (known as a Philippine); and relationships between north and south, man and woman, colony and colonizer, and adult and child.

Grant’s response to Cixous and Philippines is the project Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest centering on the image of a forest as a representation of both the shared imagination and a place for congregation and collaboration.  Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest includes a large-scale installation of a forest and a collaborative drawing that invites community participation. Trees in the interior forest will be made of both text and textiles. The drawing, functioning both as an illustration and a text scroll, represents a visual narrative of Philippines. Created by Grant in conjunction with other artists and members of the public, the process of working jointly invites contemplation of Cixous’s concepts and develops a platform for shared imagining. The two iterations of the installation in both Santa Monica and Saint Ouen function as mirror images, or twin versions of the same whole.