Suzanne Lafont: index

Erna Hecey Gallery is pleased to present Index, a special project by Suzanne Lafont.

In Index a series of images and words are put together to form a kind of dictionary. Composed photographs of different objects and everyday things are associated with words in French and English and arranged alphabetically. This procedure breaks with standard categories of classification in order to permit a novel and unexpected regrouping of the world in its bewildering diversity. At the beginning of his influential study The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses), Michel Foucault recalls a passage from Borges which recounts an imagined taxonomy of animals according to an unheard of system of classification: this possibility of the break-up of familiar patterns of thinking and a radically new distribution of things serves as the inspiration for Foucault's history of systems of thought. In Index the connections between words and images is not one of illustrative storytelling or commentary, but rather an experimental and playful redistribution played out in the field of culture.

Suzanne Lafont is a highly esteemed French artist, well known for her stylized images and theatrical narrative scenes. She turned to visual art after her literary and philosophical studies, focusing her attention on how images result from a process of cultural elaboration and construction. Her more recent work develops the fictional aspect of images, exploring the ludic potential of illusion. Since the 1980s, Lafont has participated in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including Documenta X (1997).

She will participate at the upcoming exhibitions Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography at Tate Modern, London (2008) and Museum Folkwang, Essen (2009); REAL. Portrait from a corporate collector of DZ Bank, Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2008); and L'ARGENT, FRAC Ile de France, Paris (2008).

Suzanne Lafont
index