Artist:
François P. Boué (lives and works in New York).

Materials:
Digital video; approximately ten minutes.

Description:
“François Boué (New York) has been producing short 8-mm films on modern architecture for several years, often edited in-camera. New Ark (2001) is made up of a series of short pans and static shots that show the architecture of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York and Colonnades Housing Complex in Newark. The compositions are reminiscent of Rodchenko, but they also evoke survey photography, due to the grainy film and the warts-and-all depiction of the architecture, shown slightly worn and clearly inhabited.”
—Fabrizio Gallanti, “François Boué + Mies van der Rohe,” Framingark (blog), last modified June 14, 2010.

“In his works, François P. Boué cautiously approaches things in our surrounding. He explores everyday architectonic details and common objects of everyday use as respectfully as incunabula of the history of architecture or civil engineering. Observers of his artistic attempts become attentive to subtleties, which first have an effect as a result of repeated approaches to an object. In short Super-8 films, he thus explores in many, often similar settings—interrupted by black frames—an engineering masterpiece… or also everyday occurrences such as how several individuals pull a transport crate up through the dark stairway of an apartment building in New York using a cable winch. Through such processes, he seeks to reclaim monuments from oblivion in that he points out their significance and also opens up new significances by means of associative references and plays on words. It is, therefore, also not surprising when he in conversation suddenly reinterprets the film projection device… The artist, in the end, also expands the concept of the monument itself…”
—”François P. Boué in the Guest Studio,” Atelierhaus.