To be like Water? Exhibiting Artist & Artwork
Virginie Lerouge Knight // My Shelter 3
My Shelter 3, 2007
Photography
45x35x3cm“Amid the hot, tropical downpour, I was completely alone, warm and protected under my umbrella, hearing and feeling the incessant patter of heavy raindrops falling from above. Peace outside and inside. At the same time, my feet connected with the soft, refreshing pool of water forming around me – calm, gentle and inevitable. A deep sense of tranquility in the tumult of my own world.”
Virginie Knight is a French artist based in Shanghai who enacts site-specific projects that arise through performance, sculpture, intervention, and performance. She has a Bachelor’s and a Master’s of Fine Art from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She wields objects that are daily and common like auguring stones.
Through site-specific installation and performance, Knight tangles with artifacts, emblems, rituals, and gimcracks. As the development of residential areas transforms them into public, thematic, kitsch shrines replicating culture, the space itself loses locality, instead becoming functional. By expressing personal perspective on public space, she levitates and observes the preset notions of structure and its use that people carry with them. Knight’s perspective is fueled by the misunderstanding that comes with a relocation across cultural boundaries. Outsiders are allowed to suspend social weight for at least some time. This allows for observation of the enactments under practice and the rituals she herself carries. It is unclear if at any point we put them down. Rather, there may be perpetual search for a place or thing with which to commemorate our socially-weighted practices. Knight’s work between Hong Kong and Shanghai elicit liaisons of identity between people and the objects they bring into their day-to-day. Much of what she does is performative, even when it’s not necessarily a performance, though she often displays her own human presence in theatre and enactment. She has studied at the Shanghai Theater Academy.
Working first out of Hong Kong and then Shanghai, she is flexible in her use of public space as a foothold. She used the image of the yellow umbrella in 2007. Exploring through identity, Knight prods at our immobile and hankering need for reaffirmation from our physical environment. Her work expresses her own feelings, even when they are deeply personal. That’s good. Otherwise, one might worry that she only exists in the public, which must become tiring.