Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques “Eden”

Aperture Gallery

This event has ended.

Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques’ Eden is the inaugural exhibition in a long-term alliance between the Aperture Foundation and and the Fondation d’enterprise Hermès, called Immersion. A French American Photography Commission. For the alliance, a French photographer is sponsored to spend a year in the U.S. creating a body of work, culminating in a book and exhibition with the Aperture Foundation, followed the next year by an American photographer in France.

For the first chapter of the alliance, French artist Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques purchased a little red school house in the town of Eden, North Carolina (population 15,527), which he used a site for an immersive exploration of the ideas of property, community, and image-making. The resultant output is eclectic, incorporating Polaroids, video, traditional photographic film, found objects, historical documents, and sculptural elements—the better to articulate and grapple with the often contradictory themes of utopia and home, the inevitable gaps between representation and reality, and the work of art as a means of re-enchantment.

In addition to his own visual investigations, Couzinet-Jacques invited a group of sculptors, writers, videographers, and other artists to visit Eden over the course of the year and to create work inspired by the Little Red Schoolhouse. Selections of the resulting work, including pieces from each of the participants and elements from the house itself, are interwoven as part of this ambitious building and greenhouse installation, designed in collaboration with architects Jérémie Dalin and Sylvia Bourgoin and with the guidance of NY Sun Works, an urban sustainability non-profit organization.

Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques (born in Sens, France, 1983) is a graduate of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Marseille (2010) and the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles (2012). His work has been featured at LE BAL in Paris, Fotofestival Mannheim, and La Galerie Particulière in both Paris and Brussels. Couzinet-Jacques was awarded a fellowship at the Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France, Paris, in 2015 and has been in residency at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris since 2014. In 2015, he received the inaugural Immersion commission given by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in alliance with Aperture Foundation. His first book, Eden, will be published by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès and Aperture in November 2016.