MIAMI, FLA.- For her solo exhibition at the Bass Museum of Art, Laure Provoust has created immersive environments that mine family mysteries and secret desires. Narrated by her soft-spoken voice, each work melds fiction and reality, luring the spectator into participation. Disrupting the typical exhibition format, the work is predicated on the notion that it is incomplete without the viewer. The entire exhibition is populated with Laure’s feminized furniture. Since the artist is European, words are either female or male in her vocabulary. The artist, who plays with both words and meaning, affixes furniture and objects with breasts in order to make the feminine quality of words both physical and manifested.

Laure Prouvost’s artistic output consistently returns to themes of escape into unfamiliar worlds or imaginings of unexpected alternative environments. A strong narrative impulse propels her practice, resulting in immersive, trans- medial installations with interwoven story lines that combine fiction and reality. Her videos, installations, paintings and tapestries unhinge commonplace and expected connections between language, image, and perception. Stepping away from traditional linear narratives, the artist crafts sensual environments laden with playful mistranslation that open a space for the viewer to grapple with the unstable relationship between imagination and reality.

Prouvost (b. 1978, Croix-Lille, France) lives and works in London, U.K. and Antwerp, Belgium. Recent solo exhibitions include Softer and rounder so as to shine through your smooth marble, SALT Galata, Istanbul (2017); the wet wet wanderer, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2017); Laure Prouvost, wot hit talk, Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdańsk (2017); AND SHE WILL SAY: HI HER, AILLEURS, TO HIGHER GROUNDS…, Kunstmuseum Luzern (2016); GDM-Grandad Visitor Center, Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2016); ALL BEHIND, WE’LL GO DEEPER, DEEP DOWN AND SHE WILL SAY:, MMK, Frankfurt (2016); DROPPED HERE AND THEN, TO LIVE, LEAVE IT ALL BEHIND, FRAC/ Consortium Dijon (2016); A Way To Leak, Lick, Leek, Fahrenheit, Los Angeles (2016); We Will Go Far, Musée Départemental d’Art Contemporain de Rochechouart (2015), It, Heat, Hit, e-flux, New York (2015), Der Öffentlichkeit — Von Den Freunden Haus Der Kunst, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2015), For Forgetting, New Museum, New York (2014). Provoust received the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2011 and the Turner Prize in 2013.

The DESTEFASHIONCOLLECTION is an incremental project conceived by the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art to consider and trouble the boundaries between art and fashion. Each year from 2007 through 2014, DESTE commissioned an artist to survey that season’s international fashion offerings and to select five related items with which to execute a capsule project, reflecting on the formal, representational, material and social economies that circulate between art and fashion. Initiated with the Benaki Museum, Athens, in 2014, the exhibition DESTEFASHIONCOLLECTION: 1 to 8 assembles all eight years of capsules and projects.

Adapted by The Bass in collaboration with the DESTE Foundation, the exhibition design in Miami Beach is created by architect Edwin Chan and marks the first time the collection is exhibited in its entirety within the United States.

DESTEFASHIONCOLLECTION: 1 to 8 seeks to compare the artists’ fashion selections and their interpretations, and to expose the ligatures, relays and exchanges within the components of the collection. Neither solely about fashion nor about art, the exhibition builds on the tensions, affinities, and distance between the two and the problem of contemporariness revealed in their relationship. Moreover, the show navigates these boundaries through a curatorial apparatus that draws connections among the elements of each capsule, while simultaneously re- inscribing separations, differences and distinctions. Participating artists in the DESTEFASHIONCOLLECTION project are: Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak (M/M Paris), 2007; Juergen Teller, 2008; Helmut Lang, 2009; Patrizia Cavalli, 2010; Charles Ray, 2011; Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2012; Diller Scofidio +Renfro, 2013; and Maria Papadimitriou, 2014.