Rebecca Bournigault | Substance

REBECCA BOURNIGAULT
Substance
18th Street Arts Center | Atrium Gallery
EXHIBITION: March 9 – April 24, 2015
CONVERSATION: Sunday, April 19, 2 -3PM with Laddie John Dill

1629 18th Street, Santa Monica, CA 90404

18th Street Arts Center debuts Paris-based artist Rebecca Bournigault’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Working with themes of attraction and revulsion, Bournigault inherits and updates feminist concerns around the body and sexuality for a 21st century audience.  Her work in video, drawing, and painting centers on themes of embodiment and desire as they operate in a social context, using the body as material as well as vessel for the production of artwork. Bournigault’s work in all media is informed by the cinema, responsive to the idealized male-female relationships on display in classic films as well as their toxic counterparts.

Bournigault’s installation at 18th Street Arts Center, Substance, presents a collection of recent works in which the artist considers the role of the body in painting from a number of directions. Through video, she examines painting and other visceral acts connected with associations of desire and abjection placed on female bodies in culture, and opposed to associations of power and virility placed on male bodies. Through paintings on paper in watercolor and oil, she explores the capacity of figuration and portraiture to express the fragmented and disassociated psychologies of contemporary lives. By turns erotic, violent, sensuous, and serene, the works describe visions of bodies mediated by technology, by society, and by social connection.

Rebecca Bournigault’s exhibition at 18th Street Arts Center and all related events are generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.