JR’s “Les Enfants D’Ouranos” will be on display at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill starting May 27.
The series “Les Enfants D’Ouranos” (Children of Ouranos) continues JR’s previous work for Déplacé.e.s, featuring children from refugee camps in Rwanda, Ukraine, Mauritania, Greece, and Colombia. The project comprised aerial photographs of 170-foot-long banners — carried by groups of people around the camp or a city — that depict the full image of a child running playfully. Les Enfants D’Ouranos also presents images of carefree children from the same refugee camps playing soccer, but without context. Rather, the children are placed in an idealized playing field where dreams may still come true.
For “Les Enfants D’Ouranos,” JR employs a new technique: Instead of printing the positive image, the artist transfers the negative directly onto wood, thereby alluding to an imprinted, idealized version of youth. In these images, surfaces reflecting light are reversed and presented as shadows, and the shadowed areas are filled with light. JR’s new strategy inverts established processes and hierarchies, upending the status quo. The artist instills images of the children directly impacted by global conflict and living in refugee camps with transcendence and the opportunity to command influence.
A large scale, site-specific version of “Les Enfants D’Ouranos” will be installed on the façade of the museum. This building intervention and JR’s signature artistic practice will become part of the museum’s dominant public view and will coincide with the institution’s 125th anniversary. As the Parrish looks back at its own origins, “Les Enfants D’Ouranos” will be a reminder that, during that process of determination and consolidation, it’s valuable to look through a reversal lens to identify spaces that open up possibilities for the future.
The installation runs through May 2024.