‘Avant-Premiere’ – Pascal-Michel Dubois

Castlefield Gallery is pleased to present “Avant-Premiere”, a new work by London-based French artist Pascal-Michel Dubois.

If we live in a society of spectacle, more often watching than participating, there can be little doubt of where most of us focus our vicarious experience: the cinema. So frequently do we immerse ourselves in celluloid fictions, our real lives forgotten in the darkness of the auditorium and overwhelmed by the dramas which unfold on the screen, that our memories of actual lived experience become confused with these other memories and our lives run in tandem with these other more communal lives.

Pascal-Michel Dubois plays upon this duality in his installation “Avant Premiere”. On a Rotadex filing system we read trailer lines, unacknowledged, from various Hollywood films. Our shared knowledge recognises, or partly recalls, the experience being invoked and we in turn summon up our memory. Dubois even provides us with a stage – a plush red carpet beneath a black cinema façade similar to that on which we once saw film titles spelt out in neat black letters.

Dubois’ installation seems to conjure a time of cinema going that is almost gone, his references harking back to a breed of cinemas that are almost lost to us, forced out by multiplexes. Under facades such as this one, cinema going was more personal, more intense and now produces a correspondingly greater nostalgia. Those films, those cinemas were like our dreams, in a time that now seems almost impossible to place and so, possibly, goes on for us forever. Pascal-Michel signals this in flashing blue lights: “ever-reve”, we dream forever.

Dubois studied at the Lyon School of Arts, France and Goldsmith College, London. Over the past ten years he has exhibited widely in the UK and France. Most recently he has shown at BoBo’s, London, Derbyshire Street Arts, London and in the X Teresa Arte Alternativo instituto, Mexico City.