Contemporary On-site presents MEMO, an installation of work by French artist Manon Bellet curated by Aaron Levi Garvey and Stevie Covart Garvey of Long Road Projects.

MEMO highlights the vulnerability of the natural environment and its impending destruction. As visitors move throughout the installation, their presence alters the collective works on view. Burning Air – a work comprised of burnt silk paper fragments – shifts and stirs while Golden Waste – an interactive work of perfumed paper made from the scents collected from endangered areas of the Louisiana wetlands – dulls over time. These pieces act as a metaphor for lost or soon to be lost environments. MEMO endeavors to visually illustrate how delicate and fleeting nature can be with mankind’s sustained impact.

Manon Bellet (b. 1979) is a French visual artist currently living and working in New Orleans, LA. Over the last ten years, Bellet has lived between Berlin, Germany, and Basel, Switzerland, where she developed her artistic practice and exhibited at many international art institutions, fairs, galleries and residencies throughout Europe and the United States. Bellet has a broad background in education and studio art having led workshops at various academic art institutions. As a European artist currently living in the United States, Bellet finds inspiration in greater Louisiana and the Mississippi delta region. These unique landscapes broaden her artistic practice as well as help develop projects that are directly related to the lexicon of these distinct geographies. In a sense, Bellet’s choice to observe rather than control her surroundings shapes her conceptualism and supports the idea that a works inception is more important than its completion. Bellet embraces serendipity as the most relevant of all creative processes while simultaneously selecting materials that maintain a certain humility in their sheer formalism. Simple and unsophisticated, these materials possess an expressive power that Bellet taps into thereby making them deliberately ‘anti-form’, as if they emerged as much from the landscape they were inspired by as well as Bellet’s own hand.