Félicia Atkinson - Ryan Foerster - Shelter Press

Félicia Atkinson

Born in 1981 in Paris, she lives and works in Brussels.

Ryan Foerster
Born in 1983 in Newmarket (USA), he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Shelter Press is an independent publishing house based in Paris and Brussels.

The exhibition is like a march, an expedition for an adventure that is slightly askew. Bend slightly and cast your eye over the ground, then turn it away towards the walls.
Your sense of hearing, and all the other senses, whirrs into action. The onlooker is in motion. He slowly takes his time and in the end lets the external contingencies fade away. 

On the ground floor, The Shelter Press Document welcomes you into an arrangement ideal for study, an active box with paper and discographic editions.

At the same time the subjective sources, in the form of bootlegs, photocopies and pirated recordings, reveal all these forward-looking avenues which daily fuel this publishing laboratory created in 2011 by Bartolomé Sanson and Félicia Atkinson. This research room, organized around a large table, invites people to study, dream, listen, contemplate... 

Upstairs, the artists Félicia Atkinson and Ryan Foerster display their works in the light and directly assert their presence. Here you will discover a similar attention paid to the fold, the bent surface, the one that does not refuse to change state. 

Through sculpture, drawing, prints and installations, the artists invited to Lieu- Commun for this first Toulouse International Art Festival and A FOR ASSOCIATES experience their praxes in a private way, by subtly matching art and life. The challenge is to create a space where everyone can find their own place, for a moment, within the very special place that the exhibition can represent. Objects and leaves are what they are, like stones, primordial forms beyond language, neither abstract nor figurative, as such, in their state of slow transformation, between the vegetable and the mineral, and even the animal. Exhibitions to unfurl time in space and, through a tectonics of artistic plates, try to get nature and culture to gently interlock. In the end there are perhaps still a few remnants, palimpsests, echoes: precisely where the archive becomes a marker, the fossil a sculpture, a delay a harmony. Art finds its place and develops with breadth and humility, letting each material broadcast its own presence. Every trace becomes the fertile loam of a subjectivity which asserts all its intimate dimension.
 

Manuel Pomar