Art is never
the object alone.
Anne-Laure Lemaitre shapes places
where makers and viewers belong.
Paying tribute to Shadow Walls’ current transitory state, over twenty artists respond to specific locations within the property’s main Victorian house and throughout its broader grounds.
REPAIR focuses on the act of mending or rebuilding not only as a physical fixing mechanism but also as an act of care, whether it be for oneself, an item, a person, a relationship, a people, or a land. Presenting mostly sculptures, video, and installations, the exhibition reflects on considered, contextual interactions between subject and space.
The artists in REPAIR understand that creating incepts from an existing substance, aim, or gesture from which one builds with intention. We all have a responsibility towards our surroundings and the broader world in which we exist. Our acts have consequences; our being engages with all we encounter.
By purposefully choosing their source materials and means of production to connect intimate personal narratives to broader complex questionings, each artist in REPAIR offers a presentation that forgoes the somewhat isolating traditional gallery model to dialogue more actively with the context in which it exists.
REPAIR is an exhibition about reclaiming space, materials, and identities. It evokes the unequivocally essential ties between living, being and making.
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.