Sandrine Llouquet @ Give Art, Singapore

My Oasis
© 2009-11. Sandrine Llouquet. Images courtesy of Give Art.

Give Art will host French-Vietnamese artist, Sandrine Llouquet’s first solo exhibition in Singapore, opening on August 31. Llouquet creates modest, delicate drawings and site-specific installations that juxtapose playfulness with the more visceral and violent.

Landscape in the Wunderkammer
© 2009-11. Sandrine Llouquet. Images courtesy of Give Art.

The title of the exhibition, I would prefer not to, comes from the novel Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville (1853). It is a short novella which can be read as an analogy for the internal struggle faced by artists who must use their skill and creativity for commercial enterprise to survive. The character Bartleby is a copywriter for a lawyer in Manhattan and eventually just refuses to write, saying "I would prefer not to" as his stock response.

Here the artist alludes to trying to work without any constraints and exploring freely the world around her .

Llouquet was born in France to Vietnamese parents and eight years ago moved to Saigon. She has worked with artists’ collective, Mogas Station and set up artists’ events forum, Atelier Wonderful. Wonderful have been involved in installation projects all over the world, creating a series of installations entitled Alice In.....Miami, Saigon and Paris. The Alice In series involved a nomadic architectural structure which played host to installation, video and sound performances.



Untitled
© 2009-11. Sandrine Llouquet. Images courtesy of Give Art