Guillaume Krick / Benjamin Thomas: Flooring Horizons

Through photographs, sounds and sculptures, this exhibition examines land development and questions the concept of infinite growth in a finite world with limited resources. A meditation on the constructing-destructing machine and suburban and urban planning, Flooring Horizons turns technology away from its functional dimension and exploits its fantastical potential. An excavator becomes a prehistoric animal and the scoop of a digger, a shark's fin. Miniature cities turn around in an arrangement comparable to an infernal machine. Ground with virtual motifs replaces the fields of peri-urban zones.

Guillaume Krick and Benjamin Thomas construct precise works in which sophistication and savoir-faire rub shoulders with the primitive dimension of the tool used to work the earth and our contradictory relationship with these tools.

The first part of the exhibition Flooring Horizons was presented at the Musée de la Roche-sur-Yon from December 13, 2014 to February 21, 2015.

Flooring Horizons is the third joint exhibition by Guillaume Krick and Benjamin Thomas, who showed together in Vierzon in 2008 and at Galerie RDV, Nantes, in 2009 with the collective Extra Muros.

Guillaume Krick (b.1981, Montreal) has taken part in several group exhibitions in Europe, including After the Fact, Berlin photography festival, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, in 2005; Panorama de la jeune création, Biennale de Bourges; Le Clou 6, Lieu Unique, Nantes; Volume One, Universal Cube Galerie, Leipzig; Artskoolgozsouth, Palacio do Cristal, Porto in 2006; Domesticalia: The Politic of Repression, Standpoint Gallery, London, Croisements numériques, Galerie des Franciscains, Saint-Nazaire, in 2007; Black Door File, Black Door, Istanbul, in 2010; Ni fixe, Ni fige, Maison Régionale de l'Architecture des Pays de la Loire, Nantes, in 2011; Episode 21, Galerie Genscher, Hamburg, Camping vor Ort, Galerie Umtrieb, Galerie K-34, Kiel, Mémoires d'éléphants, L'Atelier, Nantes; 3 en Un, Le Générateur, Gentilly, in 2012; Episode 21, Galerie Westwerk, Hamburg, in 2013; D'ici d'ailleurs, Espace d'Art Contemporain Camille Lambert, Juvisy-sur-Orge, Montez im Exil, Wurzeln Weit Mehr Aufmerksamkeit Widmen, Kunstwerk, Cologne, in 2014.

Benjamin Thomas (b. 1981, Nantes) is a musician, actor and sound artist. He worked at Radio France with the Atelier de Création Radiophonique du Grand Ouest for which he produced documentary series (Le goût de l'exil in 2008). His sound creations were broadcast on Arte Radio, at sound creation festivals and in galleries. He also created Madrid Corps Perdu (2009), Musique de flux (2009), Musique de ruines (2009), Czech Traffic (2011). Between 2013 and 2014, he produced a series of four sonic and visual performances that constituted portraits between fiction and documentary—Je ne suis pas Henri Ogé, Vouloir le scalp de Beckmann, Sanders face au chaos du monde and Vie et mort de Loyola Sanchez—by collaborating with collectives of artists such as Poisson Hurlant and Extra Muros. He regularly works with theatre companies and wrote Textes de voyage (Kenya, Tanzanie, Ouganda, Maroc, Guinée, Argentine, Uruguay, Inde, Costa Rica, Nouvelle-Zélande) between 2008 and 2011, Paysages désaffectés, poèmes politiques (2014) and a play on urban planning, La Grappe, in 2014.

Exhibition produced in collaboration with the Musée de la Roche-sur-Yon, with the support of the collective Extra Muros (Nantes), the Région Pays de la Loire, FABRIKculture (Hégenheim) and Agelia