Working across a range of media - film, video, photography, sculpture and live performance, Cyprien Gaillard (b.1980) frames the contemporary landscape as a complex site of loss and potential, manifested through architecture, monuments and history. Recent works have been concerned with the destruction of post-War modernist architecture, and the demise of the Utopian ideals on which such structures were founded. Gaillard’s practice is characterized by a tension between order and chaos, a resistance to the notion of archaeology as fixed or passive, and a suspension or re-location of time and place.

For Frame, Laura Bartlett Gallery is pleased to present Cyprien Gaillard’s Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009) a 16 mm film that takes place principally in and around the Mexican city of Cancún. The nine minute film has a sequence of five parts or chapters set to a particular looped recording of “Le Feu de St. Elme”, by Haïm Saban and Shuki Levy (1982).

The city of Cancún, founded in 1970, offered Gaillard a landscape perpetuated by a spirit of amnesia, anachronism and ruin; that of the ‘spring breakers’ returning to the US with but addled recollections, or the architects who built modern hotels upon Mayan ruins. Within the film's typically non-narrative structure, a spirit of displacement presides, time and space are annulled in the moment of the spectacle and the delirium of the carnival.

Biography: Cyprien Gaillard (b.1980, Paris) Selected solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims (2009), Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (2008), Centre International d’Art et du Paysage, île de Vassivière, L’Atelier du Jeu de Paume, Paris (2007).
Recent group exhibitions include the Berlin Biennial (2008) and Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009). Forthcoming solo exhibitions include, The Wexner Centre, Ohio and a two person exhibition at The Hirshhorn, Washington DC, USA (2010.)