Myriam Tapp’s work questions the transformations of our environment and the temporality of such transformations wherein the different layers of change are not always visible. She studies the landscape that we can see as well as the landscape that was and no longer exists. The house, a recurring object in her work, appears as the focus of her video-sculptures. These are ecosystems in which the architectural home is confronted to animated images.

 

The houses created are thin, fragile, translucent, empty, almost abandoned. The artist has compared them to hermit crabs’ shells: delicate and hollow. These shells appear to contain or to recount what once lived in them. “The empty shell, like the empty nest, calls back to daydreams of refuge.” (Gaston Bachelard[1])

 

The omnipresent fragility of the house in her sculptures sheds light on the complicated relationship between architecture and time. Set in a landscape, the architectural object is a marker of time that inscribes the territory onto history. Her houses however seem to escape such markers of time. Uniform and almost porous, the houses invite us to project a different story onto them, one that is individual or theatrical. The images which are projected on the sculpted surfaces create surrealist landscapes where the shadows stretch past the frame to create a new narrative. The sculptures become backgrounds and the screen-houses become the protagonist of a story or a dream that can be narrated by the viewer.