French Version

How far can we stretch reality until it breaks? How many layers can we add on to reality before it collapses? These questions are at the heart of LIQUID SKY, a group exhibition, the first installment in a series of projects organized by Marc-Olivier Wahler about the elasticity of the real.
The second exhibition in the series will be held at the Swiss Institute-Contemporary art in New York: EXTRA, from March 5 through April 26 2003.

1. When the gas runs out, the motors stop. Silence sets in and the extraterrestrials arrive.

2. In the exhibition, LIQUID SKY, 28 cars are overturned and meticulously parked, one next to the other. Walking on the new floor, formed by the chassis, or through the upside down interiors of the cars, we feel as though the world has been turned on its head.
Alone in another room lit with an atmosphere of twilight; a sleepwalker seems to be lost. The deafening buzz of a helicopter tears through the space every 15 minutes.

3. The Huey UH-1H or the Sikorsky Black Hawk - the models used by the CIA when they perform undercover operations - the Black Helicopters bear no identifying marks. Through their tinted windows they monitor close encounters of the third kind.

4. In the film LIQUID SKY, invisible aliens in a tiny flying saucer come to earth looking for heroin. They land on the roof of a New York apartment, where a drug dealer lives with his top model girl friend: the androgynous, bisexual nymphomaniac, Margaret. The aliens soon discover that the human pheromone created in the brain during orgasm by Margaret's many lovers is preferable to the heroin they had been searching for. The model's casual sex partners begin to disappear.

5. When we are underwater and we lift our heads, what do we see? The sky or the surface of the water? And a sleepwalker: what does he see?

6. LIQUID SKY evokes the moment of floating, while jumping up, just before changing directions to return back down to the earth. A brief second of elation, extended during the course of this exhibition. LIQUID SKY initiates a series of projects, taking on the theme of the diverse forms of the real, in order to reveal its extreme elasticity. Art of today glides on the surfaces of the visible and reveals the limitless number of layers that make up its construction. Art of LIQUID SKY contributes to the densification of the real, to the complexities of the real. Art does not attempt to develop new worlds or new platforms outside of reality. It constitutes a movement, an energy, a constant oscillation which serves to shake up our interpretive system. It is the pump, which dilates and contracts reality.

(Marc-Olivier Wahler)