Annie Versailles

The gallery at MEZZANINE is slap bang in the middle of an industrial estate. I am on the edge looking in, past the rolling metal shutter, at the scene spread out before me.

The glossy pink dust cover of a book called La Vie Parisienne is stapled to the wall. The title is in dainty curly cursive and there’s an illustration of a girl caught in a gust of wind — the wind whirls around her blowing blossom petals and leaves, tousling her hair, she holds down her skirt but, oh! The wind has sexily undressed her and her perky little tits are squishing together as she reaches for her skirt — ooh la la! There is a glass pebble blobbed over the windy girl’s face, obscuring and magnifying her coy expression.

Two paper cutouts of cutesy heeled shoes, very French, with a precious little floral detail across the front. Chalk lines sketch out the shape of dainty stylised legs. A treble clef curling into itself on the wall. Paper sheaths folded into the shape of hardback novels, stacked into a neat row, PEACOCK written at the top of the spine. A pocket sized grey oval with a slither of an image, the small of a girl’s back, nude and shadowed, strawberry blonde strands tickling their way over skin. A pile of confetti, a drawing of a top hat with a scrunched head below, the words je ne taperai plus les garcons (I won’t hit boys anymore) in neat joined up handwriting. An upturned teacup that sings opera. Then, like a grand finale, a baby blue chiffon ballgown is draped over the suspended light fixture. It wafts overhead, neat little folds ruffling in the wind.

This is an interesting kind of duo show, made by Kelly Wu and Jo Ackerly, two artists working under the pen name Annie Versailles. Annie is a fictional white French woman, a collective persona for Kelly and Jo to come together and inhabit. Annie is obviously French, cartoonishly French, an English idea of what Frenchness might be or mean. She is chic, coy, girlish, she has frills, airs and graces. In being imaginary, she is like the platonic ideal of a Real Girl.

I am thinking about what it means to make a character. They can be whatever we want them to be. The character and their world is imagined, spirited up. We inhabit them by suspending ourselves, exiting all that our selves might mean. We take on new meanings, meanings that belong to this character. They open a portal or act as a portal, allow us to move through into an-otherness. We can act as they might, think as they might, make as they might. We open ourselves up to things that might’ve been previously unimaginable or impossible to our actual-normal selves. Saying it in this way makes it feel boring, theoretical. It is playing, it is fun, we are creating things! Worlds for ourselves, worlds between us, worlds we want.

On the edge of the gallery, looking in, the wind whirls around me. It ruffles my hair and nearly blows the press releases out across the industrial estate. I look at the girl on the glossy pink dust jacket. I am thinking about how all this work is full of things I don’t know. I am given enough information to guess or sketch out a partial understanding. The work pulls me into its mechanism, I build understanding by making a psychic leap. Without speaking, without knowing, I can understand that Annie Versailles is cartoonishly French as a shortcut to ease and glamour - the je ne sais quoi of French girl style that only seems to exist in the Anglophone imagination. The reality of La Vie Parisienne doesn’t matter, it’s handling and building on a character that exists in our (English) national cultural imagination, it’s about the imagination’s capacity to romanticise existence outside yourself, romanticise an-otherness. Saying it in this way threatens to puncture the imagination’s romantic power. It is much more interesting when you suspend words, throw your mind somewhere else.

Sometimes, when I am writing, I cannot say something in my own voice so I have to create another. I have to spirit up these little fictions, pretend. To throw your mind somewhere else is a complete way to attempt at understanding. If all of this is true, this pretending, then I have questions about the truth — what it might even mean or how important it might be. Sometimes, when I am writing, I feel like the truth is the least interesting thing for me to play around with. The un-truth is the only thing that can be made. Maybe we exit ourselves, make fictions to make meaning or sense. Maybe we make fictions to destabilise the world that already exists. Maybe we make fictions to make the future, or to move forward into the future. Saying it in this way makes it feel esoteric, woo-woo. But I think this is a function of art.

Sometimes I find myself thinking about how art is so weird: a weird thing to do, a weird interest/obsession to have, a weird way to spend your time. And then the wind catches, the thought flips; art isn’t weird, the world is weird, being alive is weird, being human has got an inherent weirdness built into it. We all just bear with that weirdness, we nod along to the conversation without really listening. Art makes the weirdness more visible. It gives it a body, it channels the weirdness into something we can see/grip/feel. It lets us play out our feelings about this weirdness. Art uses that weirdness as a texture within itself. Maybe in past ages, if we wanted to fling ourselves into the beyond we’d have looked to shamans or witches. Now I look for it in art, in wild places, half-undone, testing and poking as it goes. I want the world to be stranger, different, I want to play forever, make the psychic leap and exit myself, enter the portal.