Integrating feminist politics with art historical reference, craft and textile, Perret creates various literary and visual structures for her own creative explorations of the world, and all of the many social systems that inhabit it. The narrative details the lives of a group of women who form a commune called New Ponderosa Year Zero in the New Mexican desert. The multidisciplinary, installation based work of Swiss artist Mai Thu Perret is primarily influenced by her fictional written work, The Crystal Frontier, which the artist has been writing since 1999. Her relationship with language and narrative is epitomized in text works such as Society is a Hole (2009), in which ambiguous musings are spelled out in bright pink lettering, inviting the viewer to fill in the gaps in the implied narrative.Ĭourtesy of Swiss Institute About Mai Thu Perret By focusing on the fragment as a narrative device, Perret invokes the pastiche technique employed in postmodern literature and demonstrates her interest in the structure of language. Through diary entries, abstract paintings, and artisanal objects, Perret constructs a piecemeal narrative describing life at the commune. Since 1999, Perret has worked on a series called 'The Crystal Frontier,' which documents her participation in a women’s commune based in New Mexico. An exploration of militant women returns in Les Guérillères (Viet Cong), which features a photograph of an unidentified woman holding a machine gun in repose, seemingly taped to a backing that features four black bands of looping scrawl.Ĭiting influences such as utopian feminist literature, art theory, Russian Constructivism, and the Arts & Crafts movement, Mai Thu Perret’s diverse body of work encompasses sculpture, painting, video, and installation. In Féminaire, her 2017 exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, Mai-Thu Perret created a tableau of monumental figures, comprising nine female soldiers and one dog at rest atop a plateau-like white plinth.

Les guerilleres