The project room of the Museum of Photography will host the French visual artist Laurene Bois-Mariage: 49 Colors of Susceptibility

On 17th of September 49 Colors of Susceptibility, a socio-critical portrait project by the French-born Laurene Bois-Mariage which combines the magic of modern digital photography and Google image searches, opens in the project room of the Museum of Photography. The artist talks about an intensification of the dissatisfaction caused by the amalgamation of real and virtual life in the society. The specially chosen visual parallels to Andy Warhol’s pop-art do not take away from the originality of Bois-Mariage’s conceptual implications. Her series comprises of portraits found in a Google image search under the keyword “angry person”, processed by the artist in Photoshop with the Paint Bucket Tool. The result says a lot – the models in the portraits seem to be reacting to the paint bucket thrown at them, playing with cause and effect between production and post-production or, metaphorically speaking, between the real and the virtual.

Bois-Mariage: “By reflecting the position of the viewer I create confusion in the actor-viewer relationship. In social media this relationship has been amplified to a crescendo, where dissatisfaction is massively increased towards nearly everything in this current social context.”
In this bold version of pop art, the artist asks a question that is answered by the deep populism surrounding us, poured into the sensitivity of 49 tones of colour.

Laurene Bois-Mariage (1981) is a visual artist originating from France, living and actively working across both Estonia and Finland. She obtained her liberal arts higher education and her later master’s degree in the l´Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Photographie in Arles. After that Laurene has worked on developing her creative path mainly through the medium of photography. At the same time, she has expanded the opportunities offered by photography by using sculptures and installations.

Artist’s homepage: https://laureneboismariage.weebly.com/

The exhibition is open 17.09.-1.11.2020

Support for the exhibition: The French Institute