Mélodie Mousset
Organ Island (we were looking for ourselves in each others), 2015
VR experience for Oculus Rift
Conducting an anatomical survey of her body using medical imagery and virtual autopsy, Melodie Mousset has been exploring her entrails for several years in a kind of epopée. Her reconstructed organs have become the protagonists of a vast artistic corpus.
The virtual reality "Organ Island” experiments with the physicality of a video game by allowing the viewer to enter the scattered body of the artist in a vertiginous trip. Falling from the sky, heart, brains, liver and co start inflating up to the size of a cathedral after landing on the ground of a desert island (the artist’s metaphore of the database). Just like a speleologist explores a cave, the viewer can enter and explore each organ and its corners. But when exiting them, he finds himself in the sky and in a weightless face-à-face with the organ before being able to return to the unusual sculpture park.
In this treasure island where data is the new gold, Mélodie Mousset discusses contemporary issues of biotechnology and privacy.
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Merging personal narratives into her work and full of surrealist fantasy and humour, Mélodie Mousset’s practice portrays life expanded by discovery and metamorphosis. Her psychologically probing and viscerally introspective sculptures are an artistic investigation into the fragmented body and the elusive self. Her work is at times a whimsical reflection on how we think about the body with the intention of showing how the biological relates to the contemporary idea of the artificial (such as with virtual reality and MRI). Her transmedial practice develops across : performances, videos, installations, photography, sculptures and interactive media. She received the Swiss art award for her first VR installation “We were looking for ourselves in each other” in 2015 and 4 awards in 2017 for her VR project HanaHana which was short listed by The Guardian among the 9 most fascinating indie game at Gamescom.
Mélodie Mousset (b. 1981 in Abu Dhabi, lives and works in Zurich) studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, EBAR, France, Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne, ECAL, Switzerland, the Royal College of Arts, London, and completed her Masters of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts CALARTS in Valencia, California. Her work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries worldwide, including MOCA (Museum Of Contemporary Arts), Los Angeles; Kunst Museum Stuttgart ; MAC (Musée d’Art Contemporain) Lyon; The Metropolitan Art Society, Beirut; Susanne Vielmetter Project, Los Angeles, Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich, HeK, Basel and SALTS, Basel.
If you are interested in exhibiting or viewing this artistic VR experience, please send an email to us.
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