Lafayette Anticipations Presents Akeem Smith and Issy Wood’s First Solo Exhibitions in France
Lafayette Anticipations is showcasing two major exhibitions running simultaneously.
On the one hand, there’s Akeem Smith, who has gathered together a collection of objects including VHS cassettes, rare photos and clothing from various Afro-Caribbean communities linked to ‘dancehall’, a musical movement born in Jamaica in the late 1970s. She revisits these memories to give them a new breath of life and to preserve memories from oblivion.
For her part, Issy Wood brings together over 60 canvases, most of them previously unseen, for what will be her very first solo show in France. The exhibition is built around the concepts of refusal and resistance, which she explores through her obsession with intimacy, interiority, care, desire, femininity, relationships and identity.
Her entire body of work evokes a refusal to accept a certain order and conveys a sense of unease towards the systems of oppression that, whether conscious or unconscious, govern human beings, especially the most vulnerable. The exhibition Study For No is thus a perspective on the way in which a refusal is heard or ignored, but also, in the words of the artist, a call to “the possibility of learning the power of using the word ‘no'”.
On the opening night, we ran into Guillaume Houzé, who was surrounded by Bernard Blistène, Paul Guyot Sionnest, Géraldine Breuil, Laurent Le Bon, Emma Lavigne, Vanessa Carlos, Christoph Wiesner and Claudia Cargnel.
Photos: Michael Huard
