WE ARE HERE

LOCATION

PETIT PALAIS, PARIS, FRANCE

DATE:

JUNE , 2024

When I was invited to be a part of ‘We Are Here’ - a monumental group show at Paris’ historic, Petit Palais Museum, I immediately asked if I could interact with their priceless sculpture collection by ‘adding wings’. I was half joking, thinking there was no way they’d let me anywhere near them. That said, in all sincerity it is something I think about every time I visit a museum collection like this.

As our genre of work has moved into the museum world, it’s important to me that it brings an element of surprise - the same surprise that comes with working in the public domain & the disruptive nature of that… a welcome jolt of subversion.

When distilled, the origin of my work is rooted in the character of the D*Dog - it’s wings and the literal meaning of my pseudonym, ‘D*Face’ to deface… and of course, most importantly the public’s reaction/interaction.

As easy or as simple as this wing-ed defacing may appear, it was far from it. The museum and its conservators were rightly resistant. The sculptures are the definition of priceless and extremely fragile as the majority are made from plaster. A tricky combination to say the least. It was to my discovery that these particular plaster sculptures sole existence was to create the sand case mould for the final bronze sculpture. At the time of pouring the bronze, these plaster versions were essentially obsolete and so in most cases are destroyed. In a twisted kind of fortune however, during WWII, many of the bronzes were destroyed, leaving only these preserved plaster versions behind, as the only record of their existence. You can understand the museum’s hesitancy for anyone to lay a hand on them then!

Thankfully, with the unwavering belief and support from Mehdi (of Galerie Itinerrance) and the Mayor of Paris, I was given the go ahead with just one day to place wings on as many as I could, most for one night only. I had no ability to test out techniques and given that each sculpture was a different size and pose, I needed to come up with something that could be scaled and constructed on-site with zero (and I stress, ZERO) damage to the sculptures.

To coincide with this we also made 350 human-sized winged headbands, free for the first visitors to the exhibition’s opening. Art imitates life, life imitates art! I D*Faced a museum! Not sure if this is a first but it sure as hell felt like we were charting new territory with this one.

Alongside countless pairs of wings, I also produced a 7ft tall concrete spray can, made to look as if bursting through the very floor of the museum. Entitled, ‘Here to Spray’ this piece was designed to be a mission statement for the exhibition as a whole; that collectively, urban artists are ready to step into the museum space and they mean to stay.