Etienne Chambaud works with a plethora of artistic mediums, shifting between sculpture, photography, sound, installation and collage to better understand the way in which we perceive objects or ideas. Frames and cages frequently surface as elastic aesthetic motifs within his projects. Animals are filmed in captivity, wooden frames dwarf small photographs and atlas’s are cut and collaged, troubling their usual boundaries and placements. Chambuad’s film La Nuit Suave (2014) typifies his interest in epistemology. The piece investigates how specific sites have influenced the modern gaze of nature, dissecting the role of spaces such as natural history museums and zoos. Both places which physically and conceptually contain beings and knowledge. Each body of work is developed over prolonged periods of research, and each installation then takes shape according to the fluctuations within Chambuad’s findings. Inventive and spatially arresting, Chambuad’s installations have an undoubtable Dadaist sentiment, as they force audiences to confront their own associations through bizarre juxtapositions and material experimentations. ...
