AR -T
I set out to interview Adeline de Monseignat about The Uncanny, an exhibition of her and Berndnaut Smilde’s work, in which her beautiful and somewhat scary giant glassand-fur eyeballs come to light ever so slightly, and which – even at a distance – fed my long-lived Freudian dream-work obsession. I initially plan to talk to her about all things uncanny and what the concept – a meeting point of peculiarity, eeriness, and an absence of consensus – means to her. Immediately, however, I fall down the rabbit hole of de Monseignat’s – for lack of a better word – specialness, and as I hold one of the baby glassand-fur eyeballs in my hands, its thick furriness frustratingly separated from me by the cold glass of its outer shell, I no longer remember what is that I wanted to ask. We speak, nonetheless, for a good part of two hours, as snowflakes the size of goose feathers fall from the sky onto London’s streets. There is a spring blizzard outside, the wind so strong to blow you away Mary Poppins-style, yet the air is still not cold enough for the flakes not to melt once they touch the ground. Despite the weather, Adeline is wearing a layered tank top and glowingly sporting a tan fresh from a mini-break in Morocco; there is what appears to be a pregnant kitten playing like a dog; even her street is somewhat of a fairy tale in itself, one of those streets where Victorian history meets restrained perfection meets modern controversy in the shape of a really famous American designer shops. There is a sensorial displacement way beyond de Monseignat’s artwork in the room, and I realize the feeling of being in some sort of Wonderland is what forms the elephant in the room – in a good way. Something is happening to me, and I realize whatever is so special about this interview is the fact that I’m not merely interviewing an artist. Speaking to Adeline about her life and work means partaking in a work of art. There is nothing graceful about a magician telling his secrets – and the same is, oftentimes, true for artists. Adeline is a bit of both: at once strong and playful, naughty and perfectly nice, extraordinary and unthreatening, and somehow the dichotomy of her personal chemistry seems to break down this truism. As boring as it can be to listen to another person recount their empty dreams, there is hardly anything more interesting than having a person let you into their world. This is even more pronounced when the artist is a true work of art, especially if it comes in a form of a truly special young woman; or as the media would call them bright young things, prolific and talented and without a hint of self-destructive pathos, whose view of the world makes you wonder where you forgot your own curiosity, and why is it that you don’t sit down and dwell on things, or observe and really see the world in all its perplexing glory. In fact, sitting next to this young artist, all of a sudden I genuinely wonder: what on earth is it that I want to accomplish with my own life? De Monseignat describes the theme of her work as its DNA; she developed a three-pegged thematic structure of the Uncanny, the Origin, and the Contact as a kind of Borromean knot to her conscious artistic mind; she also uses mind maps to create and explain her work. These means of cognitive discipline aren’t how she finds inspiration but rather how she keeps it at bay, realizing she is constantly at risk of a tsunami of thought overflowing her. It’s, according to her, how she keeps herself from being spread too thin.
Words by Ena Martinovic | More infomations : Watch for Adeline de Monseignat on adelinedemonseignat.com, the streets of Brooklyn, London, or Monaco, and The Ronchini Gallery ©.
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