Annette Lemieux

Annette Lemieux is an American artist active since the 1980s in the field of post-conceptual art alongside the artists of the Pictures Generation. Lemieux creates paintings, installations and photomontages where pre-existing images are placed in new contexts so as to create unexpected meanings and associations to reflect on the evolution of visual codes and the use of images in consumer society. The installation presented here, Search, consists of a number of helmets on wheels dispersed in a dark room. By simultaneously recalling the helmets of miners and those of soldiers, Lemieux intends to solicit multiple interpretations. The wheels under the helmets indicate that they can move in unpredictable directions as if searching for their path in a reality that appears chaotic and unforeseeable. By mixing playful elements with more serious ones, Lemieux erases the original use of the object to recontextualise it in another dimension. Search is therefore a metaphor for the constant search for meaning and answers that engages us daily both as individuals and as collectivity.

Annette Lemieux (1957, Norfolk, Virgina, USA), lives and works in Boston. She graduated from the University of Hartford in 1980, then she moved to New York City. In her practice, Lemieux appropriates pre-existing images and objects with which she creates new meanings through novel juxtapositions, thus merging personal and collective histories. She has participated in several art exhibitions such as Whitney Biennial, New York (1987, 2000), and the “Open” section of the 44th Venice Biennale d’Arte (1990). She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum, New York; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Castello Di Rivoli, Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin. She has won awards such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mies van der Rohe Stipendium and the Pollock-Krasner Grant. In 2009 she received an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from Montserrat College of Art. She currently teaches at Harvard University.