‘For One Solid Time, Wet.’ A new exhibition on the swimming pool in the imagination, which I will open at
@mbalelocle later this year. Co-curated with
@federicachiocchetti .
This exhibition explores the swimming pool as a significant motif within the history of art. It unites artists who have explored the complexity of the pool, using it as a symbol of both prosperity and catastrophe, joy and solitude: a metaphor for our search for order and serenity in an increasingly uncertain future.
At once an architectural and sculptural object, a geometric space, and a stage for bodily experiences, the pool embodies the control of nature, and a form of collective dreaming tied to modernity, well-being and intimacy.
Within the exhibition, the swimming pool is considered as a political instrument or environment, bearing similarities to the museum or the art gallery: a space in which light, bodies and lines are controlled, where order prevails over disorder, and where certain boundaries govern behaviours, interactions and norms. Writing in The White Album, on California and water usage, Joan Didion argues “a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable.”
This work is Alain Jacquet (1939-2008), Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1964. The title of the exhibition pays homage to Wet, a short story by Laurie Colwin, in which the swimming pool plays a central role in explorations of control, jealousy, intimacy and secrecy within a marriage.
More details - and artists - coming soon!
