Foyer Flux Fossils
Tiphaine Calmettes, Hunter Longe, Isabell Schulte
08.06-04.08.24
Opening 07.06.24, 6pm

With an intervention by Jonas Etter

The exhibition Foyer Flux Fossils takes place at CAN Centre d’art Neuchâtel from June 8 to August 4, 2024 and presents three practices that we propose to relate to the geographical environment of Neuchâtel. Tiphaine Calmettes’ works, in raw and baked clay, wood or wax, take up elements of furniture or everyday objects, decorated with plant or zoomorphic motifs, that the public is invited to use as such during the exhibition. Isabell Schulte’s large-format drawings are composed of repeated, abstract, geometric or linear motifs, covering the entire paper surface and evoking printed circuits, micro-organisms or chimerical landscapes. Hunter Longe proposes a subtle series of installations and in situ interventions that combine fossils, minerals, solar panels, video projections and sound amplification, scattered throughout the main exhibition spaces, the intermediate passages as well as in the art center’s vaulted cellar which has been dug out of the bedrock. He has also invited the artist Jonas Etter to intervene in the infrastructure of the CAN with a work that influences the overall perception and ambience of the exhibition.

Taken together, these practices reveal what they might have in common: processes of material transformation and a perception of time that links our contemporary era to that of the enigmatic origins of life. This correlation serves as the axis of the exhibition, leading us to question the relationship between these notions, particularly through the term meta(-)morphosis. How does anything evolve on a geological timescale or under the artist’s gesture? How does a form, through repetition, become a rhythm? How do unstable substances interact with seemingly inert relics? Foyer Flux Fossils is an exhibition that connects experiences of the tangible world with our imagination and with what we project when we come into contact with matter.

The exhibition opening will kick off with the performance AQUA-QUAZ by artist duo Set & Chloé and music group Sans Âge. This action, which is the result of a month-long residency at CAN, will take place on the shores of Lake Neuchâtel. Dressed in diving suits, the artists will sample underwater QUAZAR data – a little-studied light phenomenon – using strange measuring instruments and unusual tools and musical devices. In the form of a report combined with a concert, the artists will play with notions of fiction and absurd, staging a narrative from their offbeat universe.