Using textile art and mise en scène, Victor Siret works on representations of the domestic, public and professional spaces, such as the suburban home, the city or the high-rise office, to confront both the appeal and anxieties they evoke. It is a process of aggregating and reorienting fragments of television or film images from American popular culture: cartoons, Hollywood or B-movies, advertisements, soap operas and, last but not least, video games.
The pieces of textile are embroidered on canvas, in half or cross stitch, which recaptures and materialises the visual and physical form of the pixel. The act of embroidery, through its slowness, freezes and digests the continuous flow of digital images that feed the artist’s practice. The installation develops this narrative in a setting conceived as an open scene with a multiplicity of possible scenarios: a living room or a workplace where pieces of fabric, murals, simulacra (artificial grass, white picket fence made of plywood) or everyday objects interact with other media.
Victor Siret’s works, whose titles echo the insertion of fragments of reality, intertwine in the same loop the ordinariness of everyday life and its violence, playfulness and alienation. Through irony or absurdity, they underline the prevalence of an irreducible unease inherent in these living spaces.
Victor Siret