Preview October 15, 11am – 8pm
Booth 3.2A
17 Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière
75009 Paris, France
For Paris Internationale, Bel Ami will present a two-person booth with Isabelle Frances McGuire (b. 1994, USA) and Dan Mitchell (b. 1966, UK): The human form is no longer an ideal; in fact, it no longer exists, except as a minor component in a complex social system beyond our understanding. To McGuire and Mitchell this shifting view doesn’t represent total devastation, or even seem to make them nervous. Boldly, and with awareness, both artists whimsically contribute to the swirl of endlessly recycled media tropes to ask if anything we think or feel–or imagine that we think and feel–is our own.
With wry humor Dan Mitchell’s marker drawings on bristol board subvert graphic motifs from 1970s and 80s advertising to recreate cigarette ads but now with the copy removed, as if to say, the tag lines and required warnings on the packets are no longer needed: Please allow us to blow smoke rings and become part of this image now intrinsically associated with suicidal excess, what fun!
Similarly, Isabelle Frances McGuire appropriates both recognizable and esoteric content to show how in our on-screen lives the image often outlasts the use and the value of the physical body or object. Across a growing body of work, Isabelle Frances McGuire turns to familiar figures in American culture with a special interest in the ones that are elevated as models of behavior worth emulating, sometimes against all odds. Whether looking to Elvis, Jesus, Napoleon, or Baby Yoda, McGuire embraces some of the archetypes that loom large in the cultural imagination, or the stories that follow them, and gives them a new uncanny life. For Paris, McGuire draws from Melville’s Moby Dick, recasting Ahab’s ship: the Pequod embodies the delusional striving of the captain, in a ship named after a diseased and murdered tribe, toward an even greater emptiness than the one inside of him, because he cannot–alas!–see the system that relies on the ambergris of whales and human sweat. In McGuire’s reenvisioning, we are all in the same boat, cycling around that same whirlpool: ill-fated, and floating on a moment.
Isabelle Frances McGuire (b. 1994, Austin, TX) lives and works in Chicago. They received their BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected solo and two person presentations include The Renaissance Society, Chicago, forthcoming); What Pipeline, Detroit (2023); King’s Leap, New York (2021); Scherben, Berlin; Mickey, Chicago (2021); Good Weather at Et al., San Francisco (2020); From The Desk of Lucy Bull, Los Angeles (2020); and Prairie, Chicago (2017). Recent group shows include My Story Gallery, High Art & Sister, Seoul (2024); Artists Space, New York (2024); Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), Petzel Gallery, New York (2024); Descending the Staircase, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2023); Tell Me What You Want, Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2023); shore, Vienna, (2023); M. LeBlanc, Chicago, IL; In Lieu, Los Angeles (2020); and At the End of the Game You Will Be Forgotten, Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York, (2018).
Dan Mitchell (b. 1966, London, UK) lives and works in London, United Kingdom. He has shown widely in and outside of the mainstream galleries in the UK and internationally. He is a founding member of the Artist’s Self-Publishers’ Fair (ASP Fair) and the publisher of Hard Mag – the ‘Stronger Than Reason’ specialist magazine, and publisher of Death Lolz and Dirty Books. His recent contributions include: Tell Me What You Want, Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2024); Dan Mitchell’s Studio Visit, Jenny’s Gallery, Provence, Zurich (2023); The Money and the Madness, Galerina, London (2023); Dan Mitchell Posters, Luma Westbau, Zurich (2021), PARTY DE CAMPAGNE, CAC, la synagogue de Delme, France (2021);These Days, Wembley Park Civic Centre and Library (2020); The End with Edith Karlson; Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn (2019); Theft is Vision, Luma Foundation, Zurich; New Dead City, Oracle, Berlin (2016); and Alcoholism, Celine Gallery, Glasgow (2016).