For two months this summer, the village of Lacoste in the Lubéron will be turned into a huge contemporary art gallery. The Savannah College of Art and Design- SCAD Lacoste - presents Intervention. The site-specific installations featured will be exhibited throughout the village as well as many of the college’s exhibition spaces, including the main gallery, Galerie Pfriem. This exhibition attempts to interact and transact with the immediate environment of the beautifully preserved medieval village of Lacoste and features installations by French artist Philippe Richard and sculptor Patrick Dougherty, as well as SCAD students, faculty and alumni.
Philippe Richard
Richard’s untitled installation coordinates a series of unfolding painted wooden rods that are indeterminate in their point of origin, path and endpoint. The installation stretches between the Galerie Pfriem and the Olivier Terrace in a meandering fashion that highlights Lacoste’s medieval architecture. Richard’s intention is to offer visitors elements of pace and discontinuity in their walk through the village. The artist, who is influenced by science and mathematics, produces installations that are concerned with being exact in shape, length or proportion. The installation created for Intervention is 1,000 meters in length. Richard will also create a series of site-specific paintings featuring lines that travel from the canvas to the walls, where they explore the space in which they are located, moving through and between rooms and doorways before returning to the canvas on which they originated.
Illustration: Philippe Richard. Photo Catherine Lang
Patrick Dougherty
Dougherty used the environment as a starting point to create his installation L’Aurore des Bories. Here the bories, small stone-built houses, become the emblem of the Lubéron, his source of inspiration. Four giant constructions made up of branches of willows and connected by an arch take the specific architecture of the bories and the landscape of the village, offering an unspoiled view on the valley of Lacoste. Combining his carpentry skills with his love for nature, Dougherty began to learn more about primitive techniques of building and experimented with tree saplings as construction material. His work quickly evolved from single pieces on conventional pedestals to monumental scale environments, requiring saplings by truckloads. During the last decade he has built more than 100 works throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
Illustration: Patrick Dougherty. Photo Catherine Lang
And others...
At a street corner, under an archway, or in the College’s spaces, appear the works of other artists, alumni and professors. Heidi Cregge, M.F.A. candidate, presents her installation, Infilling in SCAD’s Galerie Bleue, and Tim Jackson, SCAD art history professor, Sacred Sky, a video installation, in a medieval chapel. Painting alumnus Fred Jesser installed Untitled: Slightly Cloudy in Silver on buildings façades. Matthew Parrott, M.F.A. candidate, presents The Brightness of Your Rising, an installation that interacts with the medieval walls of Lacoste. Matthew Watson, M. Arch. candidate, and Scott Dietz, SCAD architecture professor, collaborate on Aberrant Lines, a series of suspended panels. Alumnus Marcia Weiss' Assemblage, a work designed for the vertical, spans the town’s main archway. From on surprise to another, under the sky of the Lubéron ...
Founded by American surrealist artist Bernard Pfriem, the Lacoste School of the Arts, located in the village of Lacoste, a beautifully preserved medieval village of about 300 inhabitants, perched on a steep hillside, in the South of France, held its first session in the summer of 1971. Since then over 1500 students have been through Lacoste.Outstanding light and beauty in an exquisite rural setting form the backdrop for a focused educational experience. In 2002, the Lacoste School for the Arts, Inc. finalized the acquisition of the school’s property by SCAD, which now oversees the academic programs and facilities..
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