Wax figures - Delphine Balley

About the book: The reference work on the artistic practice of photographer Delphine Balley was published in co-publication with the macLyon following her eponymous exhibition in 2021.

Content: Wax Figures is a journey through time and the vernacular, developed around a set of three films and fifteen photographs taken in the camera, supplemented by new sculptural work. The artist probes, through a study of rites of passage, the representation and dysfunction of social theater. The whole is constructed as a lacunar story, in which the closed door of the family portrait, the tradition of genre painting, still life and the iconography of ruin – that of the physical body as much as the social body – meet. .

Through the construction of her own inventory of beliefs, Delphine Balley highlights social legacies and symbolic uses of places, from the cradle to the grave. The space of the domestic, omnipresent in his work, allows him to think of the image in different planes, evoking the temporalities of the story. The decor, in films as much as in photographic work, has a structural role: like an architecture of the intimate, it contains the rigidity of the family place, reflecting, literally, the inconvenience of positioning oneself. Nourished by themes of pretense, metamorphosis, disappearance, these associations which materialize our interior worlds invoke both psychoanalysis and Surrealism.

This bilingual work, rich in illustrations, will also include texts by Agnès Violeau and Chantal Pontbriand, Canadian curator and art critic, as well as an interview by the artist with Melanie Pocock, curator at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham .

Condition: Used

French language