inkjet print on cotton paper, mixed-media collage, mounted on boardConditions
Description
Human-crafted. AI-refined.
The artwork features a minimalist composition, employing a simple yet striking use of text as the central visual element. The word "DOCENT" is prominently displayed in a bold, sans-serif font against a plain, white background, creating a stark and impactful visual statement. The clean, monochromatic palette and the direct, straightforward presentation suggest an exploration of language, meaning, and the role of the docent or art guide in the museum context. This conceptual piece likely aims to challenge the viewer's perceptions and prompt reflections on the nature of art, interpretation, and the mediating function of the docent. ...
Working with collage, drawing, installation and video, Victoria Colmegna explores the fluid dynamics between psychology, medicine, art and fashion. Mobilising kitsch, glossy aesthetics, Colmegna frequently layers pop cultural objects together with archival fragments or art historical images, weaving together bizarre cultural tableaux. In her collage series The Cure (2023), Colmegna gathers various books such as Freudian texts, A Tibetan Book of Healing, a cosmological study and information booklets around Bipolar, photographing these texts in gaudy, camp contexts. Lingerie, care bears, studded leather belts and tiaras enshroud these books. Each print acts as a hallucinatory self-portrait, referencing Colmegna’s coming of age, or perhaps rendering wider culture’s conflicting social messages. Other bodies of work have seen Colmegna delve deeper into this exploration of self, drawing her own self-portraits alongside found yearbook images, or fictionalising moments from history such as the Manson murders. This fleeting, kaleidoscopic investigation of popular culture characterises Colmegna’s practice as she continues to untangle the ever-changing contours of culture and its relationship to selfhood. ...
Conditions began as Bonny Poon in 2017, Paris. Located on the 26th floor of a brutalist residential tower in the 13e, the gallery was co-founded by Nathaniel Monjaret (Marbriers 4, Geneva) and artist Bonny Poon.
Since 2023, the gallery is known as Conditions and is based out of Toronto’s Chinatown, while operating internationally. From the outset, Bonny Poon has striven to highlight the conditions that make art—from its production to sale—possible.
Beyond the art on display, we foreground the history of our artists' attitudes, positions, and networks. We have presented the Parisian and Canadian debut of many intergenerational artists and cultural figures, emerging and established.
As a gallery and an auto-fiction, we support transgressive artists and critical experiments. We mine the backstage, backroom working relations that unfold between our artists, clients, critics, and dealers—a parade of economic reality, a lasting dream of community. ...
