mirror mirror

Henry Speller was born in the settlement of Panther Bum in the Delta country of Central Mississippi. He grew up working on Delta where he often drew pictures during his lunch breaks. In 1939, he left Mississippi for Memphis, Tennessee. Speller moved to a house located a few blocks from Beale Street, the musical heart of Memphis. He was an accomplished blues musician who played guitar with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. The imagery and insistent rhythms of the Delta blues flow through Speller’s work, but his iconography is an explicit commentary of the social, economic, and racial exclusions he observed throughout his life.

For more than thirty years, Pascal Tassini has been frequenting the Workshop of Créahm (Belgium), where he created his own house of objects attached to each other by rosaries of cloth knots. As with Schwitters, Tassini’s Merzbau is protean and evolutionary. This “hidden husband of Annette Messenger” (says Léa Chauvel-Lévy) produces, with a similar process, the various elements necessary for the sumptuous wedding he dreams of, from the wedding dress to the buttonholes. Presented in 2019 in the exhibition “Extravaganza” of the Treger Saint Silvestre collection, Pascal Tassini is also part of the collections of the Madmusée (Belgium) and the Hervé Lancelin Pinacotheque (Luxembourg).

Born on 1979, living in Shiga Prefecture, Japan. Has been participating in “Atelier Yamanami” since 1997. While she likes chatting with her friends and staff members, Yumiko embroiders by herself, cherishing her time alone. She quietly moves her needle sitting down by herself in the corner of dining hall or lounge. Yumiko’s embroideries are made of “circles.” Depending on the size of base cloth, she decides rough arrangements and draws a draft with a pencil. She then follows the outlines piercing her needle to the base cloth with a unique method of stitching obliquely back to where it began. While she simultaneously works on multiple “circles,” the density of stitches is different from one[…]

This is the story of an anonymous photographic collection that surfaced from the secret depths to which it seemed doomed. Hundreds of amateur prints created over the course of a decade, between 1996 and 2006, that bear witness to the fetishistic habits of its author, manifested through pictures of legs covered with tights, taken either in the street or from a television screen. His practice evokes that of Miroslav Tichý, with the principal difference that our photographer sometimes becomes a subject himself. In both cases—as is often true with art brut—are the burning questions of the construction to which our gaze proceeds and of the collective imagination’s role in this individual[…]