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Valérie Mréjen will discuss her solo Passengers project at the Wattis Institute. Wattis Upper Gallery, San Francisco Campus.
The French artist Valérie Mréjen is both a published writer (her books include Mon grand-père [1999] and L'agrume [2001]) and an established filmmaker, although both media often overlap and interrelate in her work. Short blocks of text that read as playlets or anecdotes characterize her writing, and they also inform her videos, which typically involve a fixed camera on a single subject who is relating a story. Mréjen is most interested in the banal, minute details of the everyday. Her films often seem intimate, featuring universal conversations or monologues. In Jocelyne (1998) a young woman recounts the story of one of her sexual experiences; in Tears of Blood (2000) a wife complains about her husband; and in Maïté and Philippe (1998) a father asks his daughter how she is. But the familiarity of these scenes, their mundaneness, takes on a curious artificiality. Each has been carefully crafted, scripted, and staged, thereby undermining any real emotional content.
