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Vaast Colson
Framing and reframing
During the winter of 2024–25, Vaast Colson stayed in the iconic artist residences that made MASEREEL’s residency programme possible for more than 50 years and are now making way for a new artist pavilion. It inspired him to repurpose the nine abandoned shower curtains for the hybrid work Framing and reframing (Gradually experiencing the consequence(s) of being in the world), which he realised in an edition of nine. Each of them consists of a stretched shower curtain featuring a manually applied screen print and some additional elements, including a USB stick and a Polaroid.
Several aspects of the work Framing and reframing evoke the concept of vulnerability. Take, for example, the two-part screen print, with a comic-like storyboard on the left and a preliminary conceptual sketch on the right. A figure wearing a hat, constructed from the same basic shapes, seems to be looking around in amazement: standing in the world, but without a concrete destination. Or: the original label on the back of the curtain, whose shell Colson associates with The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), is extended in the Polaroid, in which the artist adopts the pose of Venus with dedication.
Colson defines Framing and reframing as a hybrid: a finished object that simultaneously has an internal memory and a permanent potential. Or even: a generator that can produce other things. For example, the above USB stick contains the sound recording I’m just a hummin’ and a walin’ (The act of finding oneself behind the screen by means of echo location) in which you can hear the artist humming and crooning as he takes a shower.
For many of us, the shower is a place we least identify with our professional activities: it is a place where you are literally and figuratively most naked and most yourself, with a shower curtain as wafer-thin protection. Vaast Colson’s intuition, however, is that such a private context is just the place in which to create. Just when your thoughts are elsewhere, surprising insights arise. If you then listen carefully to the snatches of text that occasionally crop up, you notice that they do not have the light-footedness you would normally expect.