Shoes Bar
Brand collaboration for Concept Store
Since 2011, the Shoes Bar presents permanently 3 installations by Mary Sue in its two shops in Nantes, France.
Especially designed for the Sneaker Concept Store, these videos play ironically with the codes and the support of advertising.
If the video image in store is generally used for advertising purposes, here Mary Sue transforms 2 screens into fake fitting rooms with offbeat performances (The fitting room, The laws of attraction) which takes the opposite of commercial codes and feminine clichés. Above the cash registers, "Social Instinct" a video installation composed of 5 synchronized screens takes up the mythical scene of Sharon Stone's interrogation in "Basic Instinct" (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) in a continuous loop and a choreography of legs which intersect and uncross in rhythm.
At this time (30 years ago), it was the supposed lack of panties that caused a scandal. If the installation has fun with an eroticism easy to replay the scene - but this time - unequivocally (Yeah, those legs do wear panties ... End of the myth men!), This is the use of the female body for mercantile ends which is denounced, by the duplication, the synchronicity, the mechanics and the lightness of the images.
The Fitting Room
Video performance
HD video, bi-screen display, stereo sound, continuous duration, 2011
Shoes Bar Nantes, France
The Fitting Room
The video image in a store is usually devoted to the advertisement. Here, the video medium transformed into a changing room diverted from its primary function, through a performance where Mary Sue struggles to try on shoes in a cabin supposed to hide her from prying eyes.
In plain view, and by the grotesque revealed in this incongruous scene ( who tries on shoes in a cabin ! ), The advertising medium is reduced to nothing, annihilating the erotic charge too often used in the market communication.
The Law of Attraction
Video performance
HD video, bi-screen display, stereo sound, continuous duration, 2011
Shoes Bar Nantes, France
The Law of Attraction
Mary Sue is sticky for the very famous advertisement Super Glue 3 ad campaign, She replays with humor what the scene would have been in a real situation, with a woman. She reveals through a trick as old as the world that no one is fooled and that the seemingly idle femininity revealed here is not only due to the laws of attraction. A way of remembering that feminism is not only a war of the body, but also the freedom for each woman to dispose of it freely.
Do not reproduce alone and without very good shoes!
Social Instinct
5 synchonized videos
HD color videos, no sound, continuous duration, 2011
Shoes Bar Nantes, France
Social Instinct
A counterpoise to the famous scene from the interrogation of the film Basic Instinct. The installation reinterprets the controversy of the presence or not of panties worn by Sharon Stone, constantly hammering this thin separation between Nature and Culture to the point of making it imperceptible and harmless. A way to defuse what was "the buzz" in its time, by reducing the lustful fantasy associated with this controversy, to a cliché now worn out.
Serial Shoppers only!
View of Shoes Bar Beaulieu
Permanent video installation show, Mary Sue
Nantes, France
In 2011, when making these videos, the Shoes Bar gave the artist carte blanche. The denunciation of the female body and its inherent eroticism used excessively were at the heart of the artist's words.
It's by ridiculing advertising imagery, turning screens into useless and grotesque changing rooms, dynamiting an ambivalent movie scene, that Mary Sue pokes fun at the clichés of these sexualized bodies being used for profit.
Today, while the images are "read" at full speed on social networks, while they are more and more simplified / codified by those who produce them, while their readers no longer have time to perceive the salutary second degree that can sometimes interfere in the images ; these 3 works are regularly subject to misinterpretation.
Recently, some defenders of the feminine cause see it as an attack on their camp. This crazy period is interesting in view of the divisions it is capable of producing. It even succeeds, the height of absurdity, in opposing the partisans of the same fight. But there is more than one way to defend a cause. If activism is one, art can also be its vector. It is indeed by including herself at the heart of the system and by distilling this register with irony that Mary Sue castigates commercial clichés.
When The Shoes Bar decides to permanently dedicate its advertising media to the artist, the brand is clearly committed to this fight and that of freedom of expression.
SHOESBAR
Store 1: Beaulieu Shopping Center, Boulevard Général de Gaulle, 44000 Nantes, France.
Store 2: 3, rue de Marne 44000 Nantes, France.
(Instagram @shoesbar_nantes)