Art is never
the object alone.
Anne-Laure Lemaitre shapes places
where makers and viewers belong.
We humans often desire stability. We seek it and thrive for it. Stability is what is known; it feels safe and manageable. It gives a sense of ownership over one’s circumstances.
Many life events may shake this grounded feeling of permanence. Illness, loss, separations: we will all experience the unexpected and will be confronted with the utter lack of control we truly have in the face of it all, whether it be due to specific personal events or through a broader opening to understanding the greater mechanisms we are bound to.
Life, in all its forms, is a fragile state in constant equilibrium. Adaptive and reactive, it inherently responds to the ecosystem it participates in and is deeply impacted by its evolution.
At the root of Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s practice is a physical, material experience. Settling for months on end in Nunavut, Vietnam, or Japan, she creates, often using local, ancestral papermaking or printmaking techniques as a means to engage with a geography she inhabits physically and emotionally. This process, and Alexa’s symbiotic nature, allows for a hyper-awareness of ecological shifts. Her works become strata, organic forms, echoes of terrains she records as a means to preserve and embody.
Many of us have been experiencing climate anxiety. Storms, cataclysms, and displacements have been increasingly part of our human experience. The way we live, as functional participants in a capitalist society, actively participates in the increasingly changing nature of our environment.
Alexa is bipolar and was only recently diagnosed as such. This discovery impacted her understanding of herself and of the way she engages intimately with the world. A known hypothesis links the origin of bipolarity to the Pleistocene Epoch, where erratic shifts in weather required fast adaptation to climate change. What is now considered an illness or disability may have been a mere evolutive behavior to a changing ecosystem.
‘In case my mind [betrays] me, let me say one last thing.’ These words from author Naomi Jackson, describing her own relationship to being bipolar, summon the feverish urge to create which comes with a deep understanding of the fragility of any one moment. The precarity embedded in impermanence makes the creative act so much more essential and precious.
But this exhibition also challenges the sense of inadequacy that comes with being marginalized. As one approaches the gallery, they are confronted with a site-specific artwork partly obstructing their view. The piece, designed to offer only partial sights into the installation, defies our ability to read a context overall. Perspective is always partial, perception, personal, and conditional. Inside, works on paper resist our understanding of their material nature, often discarded for being delicate or fragile despite their inherent versatility and resilience.
Alexa makes herself part of the papers she uses. These handmade processes, learned amongst other locations while in residency with traditional makers in Japan whose papers she has been using for more than 15 years, have been preserved and utilized for over a thousand years.
Traditional paper-making processes require and participate in a clean environment. They build on a respect and reverence for one’s surroundings. Alexa’s practice is highly influenced by her understanding of the world and its natural rules. Versed in gyotaku, a historical technique in which the imprints of real fish are used as motifs but can still be further washed and consumed, she employs non-toxic inks for this process. Her practice seeks not the thrill of immediacy but instead aims at connecting secular artistic, practical, and environmental knowledge and instinctual gestures to the now.
In a society where our way of life actively participates in our destruction, perhaps other praxeological approaches and misunderstood cognitive behaviors considered less functional or adequate hold inherent wisdom we too often summarily reject as ill, foreign, and other. By embracing uncertainty as an inescapable and integral part of one’s life and accepting what we may learn from a leap into the unknown, we may perhaps find new ways to reconsider and question broader destructive systems we perceive as immutable.
Photo: Alexander Laurent Rubalcava
Anne-Laure Lemaitre is a curator, writer, and producer based in New York, Paris, and the Nova Scotia wilderness. Her practice begins by questioning a territory: its physical and emotional dimensions, its history, its context, its belonging, before turning to the art it calls for. This orientation has shaped a body of work spanning the most experimental corners of the emerging art world and leading corporations and public institutions.
Many artists she has worked with early in their careers have since gone on to significant critical and market recognition. Those relationships rarely end with the exhibition. For several, she remains a resource: someone to think with, exchange with, workshop with.
For nearly twenty years, she has worked across scales and contexts: from intimate solo exhibitions at artist-run spaces to permanent public commissions, from single-artist career conversations to cultural programs spanning five continents. Her practice is built around the specific rather than the repeatable, treating the space, the institution, the sidewalk, and the online environment each as curatorial material in its own right.
Lemaitre writes regularly about art for catalogues, publications, and for herself. Her writing, whether commissioned or not, tends toward the felt rather than the prescribed: a belief that how we speak about a practice, and what it does to us, shapes how it is seen and received.
Intentional art programs · Site-specific commissions
Curatorial strategy · International practice
Art In Context is a curatorial production practice whose work ranges from international public commissions, corporate collections and multi-venue cultural strategies to ongoing collaborations with artists, brands and cultural institutions.
Every project begins with the same questions: what does this place need, what story belongs here, and who should tell it. That orientation shapes everything from artist selection and fabrication to the logic of how a program holds together in one location or across multiple sites.
Drawing on nearly twenty years of work, Art In Context has built the infrastructure to operate anywhere and at any scale. An extensive network of creative partners allows it to move from a single commission to a coordinated program spanning dozens of sites without losing the specificity that makes a project land. Art In Context works worldwide.