Lucie planty: scrying frames
Visions: A Singapore-France Emerging Artist Residency Programme
Opening Reception | 2024 AUG 28, 5:30PM - 8:30PM
2024 AUG 29 - SEP 01 | Wednesday - Friday ,1PM - 7PM. Saturday - Sunday, 1PM - 6PM.
39 Keppel Rd, #03-10 Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore 089065
brief
SCRYING FRAMES is a solo exhibition by Lucie Planty that concludes a month-and-a-half-long artist residency at INSTINC Space as part of the "Visions: A Singapore-France Emerging Artist Residency Programme”, a joint initiative by the National Arts Council and Embassy of France in Singapore aimed to create a dialogue between the French and Singaporean art scenes. During her time in Singapore, she created several new works specifically for this exhibition as part of the residency.
She has collected found objects, a common practice in her work. Her focus was on several Super 8 reels containing family footage from unknown origins that had been abandoned by their original owners. After digitizing these reels, she transformed each frame individually using a mix of traditional digital techniques, AI tools, and drawing. Each frame was modified through approximately 10 steps. The film comprises about 20,000 frames (she worked on roughly three times that number before making her selections). Lucie Planty chose sequences that avoided overly recognizable or specific locations and rendered faces in a way that maintains their anonymity. At the same time, she worked with sounds from old tapes to create the film's soundtrack. She blended multiple sounds that intertwined, resulting in a fragmented, barely discernible mix of noises. This sonic work aligns with a genre known as ‘Hauntology,’ which aims to evoke memory and the past through degraded sounds using vintage recording devices. Finally, she extracted frames to produce unique images, which are presented as crumpled prints on a translucent veil.
The term 'scrying' refers to the practice of gazing into a reflective surface—such as a mirror, a pool of water, or reflective glass—to glimpse images of the past or future. At the turn of the 20th century, cinema enabled such visions: it brought forth images from the past, revealing scenes, people, places, and gestures by displaying them on a bright surface. While we may not always identify them precisely, these familiar moments resonate with us. The video Scrying Frames, presented here by Lucie Planty, offers such visions, depicting simple scenes: children swimming in a river, lovers resting in a park, and a stroll along the beach. These ordinary moments of life appear as distant dreams that seem to hold a secret. The light gray tones, with their distortions from digital processing, enhance the sense of vanishing. An almost enchanting phenomenon occurs in this luminous film projection, where the dense substance of time suddenly unfolds before our eyes.
BIO of Artist
Lucie Planty has been developing a practice of image collection for several years, often in the form of books, installations, and paintings on the theme of disappearance. She has exhibited her work in Colombia (2022-3), Italy (2018), Belgium (2017), Ecuador (2016), China (2015), and the Czech Republic (2014), as well as in various French contemporary art institutions (Salon de Montrouge, Fondation Ricard, Cneai, Friche de la Belle de Mai, Cité des Arts, Biennale d’Arts Actuels...). She received the Albéric Rocheron Foundation Prize at the Felicita 17 exhibition, was nominated for the Grand Prix of the Bernard Magrez Cultural Institute in Bordeaux, and for the AMMA Prize for Contemporary Art at the Bastille Design Center (2017); she won the Sciences-Po Young Talent Prize at the Beyond Heritage exhibition (2016). She graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris with honors, studying under Claude Closky and Jean-Marc Bustamante (2016). She co-founded the artist-run space in.plano (since 2017), an exhibition and production venue on L’Île-Saint-Denis, which received the François De Hatvany Prize from the Beaux-Arts de Paris (2018) and support from the Fondation de France (2023-4).
Website: lucieplanty.xyz
Instagram: Lucie Planty (@lucieplanty)
