Resting (2013)
17 PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE ARTIST'S DIGITAL ARCHIVE (2005)
People usually rest at home: in a safe, intimate context. Some also sometimes find themselves resting in front of everyone. Some nap in public because the sun is shining and the tender grass of the park is enticing; others simply sleep on the sidewalk because they have no roof over their heads. Since 2005, during her street ramblings, Ria Pacquée has been taking pictures of people of all kinds resting for a while in a park, on the sidewalk or on a bench. For Museum to Scale, she selected seventeen photographs from her archive. The whole is an alienating collection of sleeping postures. By pulling the motif of the public sleeper out of its everyday context and placing it in a museum space, Pacquée creates a parallel reality in which the rules of behavior of bourgeois society are called into question. This dislocation of norms and values is reinforced by two photographs of sleeping people on the floor of Pacquée's museum space.