Mireille Loup. 53.77
16 may – 14 june

Mireille Loup will show her latest project “53.77” at Pobeda gallery. Mireille educated at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Photographie in Arles, France. She had 27 solo exhibitions over the Europe, 6 monographies and over 90 publications. Her works are consists in following collections: Metropolitain Museum (NY,USA), Museu da Imagem (Braga, Portugal) Mario Testino collection (Paris, France). The “53.77” was exhibited on the international festival of photography, Les Rencontres d'Arles 2012, at the Grande Halle.

The anaglyphic process enables a three dimensional reading of each photograph using Red and Cyan anaglyphic glasses. Different planes appear in the image which move along with the spectator. The photographs are bichromatic since the anaglyphic Red and Cyan process is being added to the black and white in the 3D sections of the image. The process comprises 6 shots, left and right of the scene, coming together in a single anaglyphic image.mThe interest of Mireille Loup’s research on anaglyphic techniques is an appealing aesthetic use of blurred images – when seen without 3D glasses- which matches the theme of the series. “53.77” fits in with the logic of the white photographs present in Mireille Loup’s 2009 Mem series that led to The Others in 2011. The Others shows three expressionless teenagers strolling in timeless places, surrounded by nets of spectral lights - a reference to Alejandro Amenabar’s film that goes by the same title. Coming after the supernatural aspects already at work in her previous series, Mireille Loup is reaching a virtual reality that the spectator can choose either to enter or to leave behind using the interactive anaglyphic process.

This work presents us with a ghostly evolution. A young girl and a ten-year-old boy are drifting in the same space with no interplay whatsoever. They seem remote from each other as if prisoners of a different time scale. Emptiness is emphasized by bare locations without any furniture or signs.

Step by step, the spectator is gathering clues. The wet clothes, the dark shadows under the children’s eyes and a kind of weightlessness, all of which point to the supernatural. Then, one may reflect on the title 53.77 - 1953, 1977- and the different temporalities. The absence is shown by the aesthetic process itself, the protagonists being blurred and grey. Only when the spectator is wearing the 3D glasses do they take their places and eventually become incarnate. In the last photographs of the series, the characters are beginning to look at the spectator who is finally stepping through the looking-glass after standing back like some kind of Peeping Tom. He sees and he is being seen at the same time. He is coming to life in their eyes at last, just as much as they came to life in his, when he was observing their virtual reality.

Pobeda gallery will also exhibit the “53.77” at the New Holland island in Saint-Petersburg, in july.