almondmadagascar-blog

[almondmadagascar-blog]

Each season, Lemaire presents qualitative men’s and women’s collections with attentive details designed for everyday life. The vestiaire consists of realistic clothing and singular pieces influenced by the cosmopolitan streets of yesterday and today Paris.

Lemaire is a collective, independent project led by Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran, bringing together a team that is united by a shared work philosophy, with clothing at its core.

The collections are designed and developed in the Marais district of Paris nearby the 28 rue de Poitou historic shop.

[almondmadagascar-blog]

We watch as they arrive at the centre of a frozen lake, and Umeda begins to bore a hole into the ice and then lower a light into it. Light spills into the darkness, refracting and spreading through the water. The actions that follow are strange, ambiguous, and utterly captivating. My thoughts veered wildly, one moment associating the scene with some kind of potions cauldron and the next, with an alien invasion. At the end of the film, we are left with a lingering shot of their illuminated footprints, a record of their actions dotted and glowing in the darkness.

For all that ‘ulo.ulo.ulo’, with its relatively straightforward sequencing and focus on landscape, marks a departure in Sawa’s work, it also carries all of the hallmarks of his practice. Drawing on his background as a sculptor, his films are a physical presence in the gallery. They are at once strange and familiar, showing us known things that have been rendered mysterious. Standing before one feels like remembering a dream, physiological, introspective and unknowable. They reflect on the process of memory, how we experience things and how we are able to recall them.

This dreamy quality is evident in the other two pieces on display at Parafin. If ‘ulo.ulo.ulo’ feels like a ritual, however, then ‘fantasmagoria’ (2017) and ‘fish story’ (2017) feel like myths. The two short films are full of images of journey and light, struggle and uncertainty. In one shot, an animated, sketched lighthouse stands on a cement outcrop in the ocean, a white pillar stark but unreal in the overwhelming blue. In another, a solitary figure drags a block of ice down a narrow, curving road. On the second screen, a group of people in identical Japanese dress shuffle along a deserted beach, the sand wet and gleaming.