Folies, the artist's inaugural exhibition with the gallery and first in Mexico, reveals the breadth of Jospin's practice and represents the formal, material, and conceptual culmination of her work to date. Featuring an immersive, site-specific installation and a series of new drawings, sculptures, and silk tapestries, the exhibition showcases beautiful and uncanny depictions of caves, forests, and architectural ruins that evoke the sublime, supernatural, and even the magical.
For just over a decade, Jospin has worked relentlessly on the manipulation of corrugated cardboard, achieving transformations of such mimetic precision that they have been revered by the press almost as acts of alchemical transmutation. The imagery of layers, product of slow geological sedimentation, offers an apt metaphor to describe Jospin's work as a whole. In it, each element accumulates over long periods of time and merges with others to form a structure of discursive solidity and unified meaning as it materializes in the opaque landscape of the cardboard. Each of these layers contributes sediments that with practice and reiteration of a single idea, its execution at different times and, finally, it’s refinement will give shape to a universe of its own.
Occupying the spaces between–drawing and sculpture, nature and the man-made, and the beautiful and the uncanny–the works featured in Folies operate in the same manner as folklore or fairy tales. In traditional folklore and fairy tales, nature (often the forest) serves as the fantastical stage for life lessons, warnings or tales of human transgressions. Jospin amplifies ambiguity as a tool to engage the spirit of illusion in her work, and like folklore, invites experiences that encompass the saccharine and joyful and the ominous and frightening.
Excerpts from texts by Anna Stothart (independent curator) and Fabiola Iza (independent curator)
