“From Dancing Queen to Drama Queen, it’s just one step.”
PARIS-B is delighted to welcome artist Morgane Ely to its PB Project space for her first solo show, entitled “It’s Raining on Prom Night”.
Pop-culture, famous icons, drama… Morgane Ely’s work is made up of a myriad of images gleaned from films and networks, the ones that capture your attention, imprint themselves on your retinas and trigger an immediate emotion. A dizzying contemporary iconography far removed from the themes that usually constitute the technique used by the artist.
“This image is perhaps the figuration of a feeling captured, in a moment of distress under pressure, of total breakdown. Girls crying, in the midst of an existential crisis. Others breaking down. A moment that should have been the consecration of the role expected of them: perfect, smiling girls in sportswear bearing the effigy of their high school, performing an acro-gym figure sensually revealing the folds of their thighs: the ultimate symbol of victory. But they failed. They’ve literally fallen, and the grace of their movements collapses with them.”
Morgane Ely overturns the pedestal on which the Queen of the Ball sits to finally raise up all those whose evening ended badly. The ones nobody invited to be her date and who, once the party was over, resigned themselves to Buzzy Lee’s remix of « Girls Just Want to Have Fun ». Those whose hearts are broken by a crush who has finally fallen for someone else. Those whose dresses have torn while dancing and who feel completely ridiculous. Yet this staging is a celebration of fallen queens, whose portraits are adorned with the only vestige of the party: the glittering curtains. Are they not the tears on prom night? Assuming defeat and laughing about it, glorifying vulnerability tinged with melancholy. Failures are ultimately successes in the making, and Morgane Ely chooses to celebrate them to remind us of this.
In a moment, her assertive posture will be ridiculously disfigured. From now on, the only thing left to do is to mope on the sofa in pyjamas, swallow a can of whipped cream and dream of being Jessica Alba (dressed as Jessica Simpson). Breakdowns, too, require their own special attire and attitude.”
“A girl on the phone takes a balloon to the head. The viewer can only anticipate the pathetic (and no less funny) fate of poor Gretchen (Mean Girls, 2004).
This exhibition might be a feminist allegory then: these female figures will not be slaves to the image we expect of them (Morgane Ely, Britney Spears shaving her head bald (2007), 2021). There will be no injunction to show women as flawless creatures, adorned with a smooth smile, frozen in a moment of perfection and beauty. “So you’re breaking up with me because I’m too blonde?” ironizes Elle Woods (played by Reese Witherspoon) in Legally Blonde (2001).
Morgane Ely creates woodcuts, initially for multiple prints, based on the traditional Japanese printmaking technique. A rigorous, codified practice in terms of both gestures and subjects, from which she tends to distance herself by choosing pop images, screen captures that she selects both from the cinema and by scouring the Internet. An image recorded in a fraction of a second can take hours to print. They then become the “beautiful counterfeits” of the initial anecdotic images. The ink-coated wooden matrices, curved in fluorescent colors, are the only traces of these images; they become the unique work of art and are no longer intended for printing. Not every woman will know what it’s like to be elected beauty queen. But one thing’s for sure: they’ll all recognize themselves in at least one of Morgane Ely’s works.
Text by Céline Furet,
Extract from the Press Release
Catalogue of Works
Morgane Ely was born in 1995 in Hayange, Lorraine, France. Graduated from the Beaux-Arts of Nancy, and then the Beaux-Arts of Paris where she learned screen printing, she spent 6 months at Musashino Art University in Tokyo to be trained in woodblock printing and engraving by masters Akira Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Hirai. She won the 42nd Takifuji Art Award and the Printmaking Prize at the Sarcelles Biennale in 2021, the Rose Taupin – Dora Bianka Prize in 2022, and eventually, the Villa Noailles Prize at the latest Emerige Revelations followed by a residency at Villa Noailles in where she will have a solo exhibition at the Ancien Evéché (the Old Bishopric) in Toulon in 2025.