Jean-Pierre Mot

In Jean-Pierre Mot’s post-studio practice, he plays with semantic shifts in which cultural practices, visual culture, and personal stories dissolve in order to be reassembled. Embodied in multiple forms – performance, video, installation, kinetic mechanism – he draws on the specificity of the context, sometimes quite literally, as his in situ projects often induce a transformation of his diet. Brand images and food packaging are, in effect, the motifs and materials that he persistently manipulates. At Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, the printing on the local supermarket’s paper bags and advertisements for a contest on the grocery bills that he received were key to his explorations. He also used crates for clementines and mangoes, as well as Coke bottles “made in Mexico.”

“Vive la bouffe (the English version is “Food is everything”). This slogan, found at the IGA supermarket, became material for two works. In the first, the paper bag on which it is printed was placed in a frame made of scraps of walnut wood. For Mot, the attraction of this wood, unearthed at Est-Nord-Est, resides in the traces left by the worms that ate at it. The presentation support thus becomes a subject. In a second project, the same slogan dialogues with another IGA slogan: “On bouffe les prix” (“Chow down on prices”). Using an analogue viewing machine that he built, Mot features a predator and its presumed victim. The image of the tiger that he appropriates comes in this case from an Iraqi brand of energy drink; that of the rabbit, from a brand of Chinese candies.

“Feed the dream.” During his stay, Mot observed that a spot of light moved daily across the floor and then up the wall of his studio, making a perfect arc. He stuck coloured acetates and cardboard cut-outs to the window, the writing and shapes of which were projected into the space by the sun’s rays. His portrait, notably, followed the same path every day toward a huge French fry, embodied by a white-oak leaf placed just out of reach – beyond the dream.