ART FORUM CRITIC PICKS - text by AMOREEN ARMETTA

NEW YORK

Eve K. Tremblay

BUIA GALLERY

541 West 23rd Street

January 10- February 9

At the entrance to Buia Gallery,

Quebec-born, Berlin-based artist Eve K.

Tremblay has posted a fan letter to Ray

Bradbury outlining an experiment inspired by

his classic dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451

(1953). Staging “a real life sort of

mise-en-abîme”, Tremblay aims to commit the

book to memory. During the opening, the

artist enacted a performance in which, among

other poses, she lay on the floor on her back

with the novel under her head (echoing both

the trademark psychoanalytic position and a

scene in which Fahrenheit Fahrenheit’s protagonist

sleeps with a book under his pillow) and

recited several pages from

memory - corrected often by a friend following

along in Tremblay’s heavily annotated copy.

Tremblay’s mise en abyme, which also

consists of objects, photographs, and

videos, is by turns earnest and cheeky. Like

a good sci-fi writer, she plays up the camp

while embracing romantic idealism. Along the

gallery’s back wall, serving as props and as

seating for playful video vignettes

demonstrating book memorization in various

locales, are three white molded-plastic chairs,

which in 1966, when François Truffaut made

his mod adaptation of Bradbury’s book, would

have signaled the future. In contrast, the

majority of Tremblay’s work is idyllic. Lining

the walls are photographs depicting

Tremblay’s “book people” - named after

Bradbury’s intellectual underground, whose

members hid in the margins keeping books,

which were prohibited, alive - among trees

absorbed in the outlaw pleasure of reading. In

other photographs, the forbidden books are

splayed suggestively on branches and

boulders.

Tremblay has set up an engaging experiment

that may be just getting started. Through her

ongoing performance of memorization, she

struggles with the desire to at once possess

and become a collection of simultaneously

tangible and immaterial words and ideas, and

to make private machinations

visible - something we can perhaps all relate

to in this era of information overload.