Valérie Hallier: Multiple Media Artist

Valérie Hallier began her life as an artist in her native France. Pursuing her interest in cinema, video, and animation, she earned a master’s degree at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris. She was awarded a Fulbright to continue her studies, this time in computer arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Eventually Valérie was able to make her home here in New York, where she has been awarded a number of arts residencies and grants. Her work includes public arts projects, multimedia installations, and creations using flower petals to explore the human condition and womanhood. She is also a teaching artist for Community-Word Project in New York City public schools. Valérie moved to Westbeth in 2022 with her daughter Elle; the following year, she was elected WARC’s Visual Arts Chair. As director of the Westbeth Gallery, she is working to raise the profile of the Gallery and to highlight Westbeth artists, both past and present.

Terry Stoller spoke with Valérie Hallier on March 19, 2024, about her public arts projects, her process in creating various iterations of her works, the influence of theory on her practice, her series of artworks in which she creates a new kind of portraiture using flower petals as her medium, and her ideas for growing the Westbeth Gallery.

Terry Stoller: You studied cinema, video, and animation at ENSAD. Were you planning to be a filmmaker?

Valérie Hallier: I was especially enamored with animation. Then I met this American video artist, Donald Foresta, who was teaching at ENSAD, and he led me to discover a whole world of video art, which I didn’t know about, mostly American. I chose that section because I was extremely interested in working with time-based media and fine art and mixing the two and experimenting with that.

Then you got a Fulbright and came to New York.

I really wanted to find a way to New York, and I applied for the Fulbright. Didn’t get it the first year, but persevered, applied again, had a lovely meeting with the American Women’s Group in Paris, the organization that funded my specific grant, and explained to them what I would be doing coming to New York. They granted me tuition to start at SVA (School of Visual Arts). So I got a Fulbright.

You came to New York with the idea that you were going to be studying at SVA.

Yes, which is not typical for Fulbrights. Usually they give you money for research. But this time it was OK to do that because my project could fit into the first year of the MFA program at SVA. But for the second year, if I wanted to continue to get my master’s, I would have to self-fund it.

Was studying computer arts going into another field?

It was a continuation of what I thought I was loving with the computer. It was like having a small world that I was in control of in three-dimension, which is what I loved about doing videos, versus a 2D plane where I would paint or draw. I loved the idea of using space, using time again, using sound—more elements. When you’re in a 3D space on the computer, you are in charge of everything, and you can do everything by yourself. What was overwhelming with the video is that you need to collaborate with a lot of people. My illusion was that by doing 3D, I would be able to be the director and do everything within this supposedly smaller environment. That was a big mistake because computers are exponentially complicated and time consuming, and you still need help. But I learned a lot, and I graduated with a 3D animation called Monster Party, and that was awarded in festivals—and I got approached by big studios in LA to go and work there. But I knew I would just be a technical person. That’s the problem also with the field of 3D. They were looking for people who would resolve technical problems rather than for creative artists.

Monster Party. 1994. Still frame from the 3D animation.

You practice your art in different areas, including public arts projects. How did you get involved with the public art project in 2012 connected to Governors Island?

First I was awarded a residency in 2011 with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, seven months on Governors Island. That was their first pilot space on the island; now they’re a fixture there. Back then nobody else was there except for the New York Harbor School, a high school where they study maritime subjects. And it was fascinating to see all those old houses on the island. I got to know LMCC, and when they did an open call about a year or so later to do a participatory project on the island, I got selected with the project Drawing Circle. It was new for me to have the public participate in a live art event. The event was in June, and I was fully pregnant with my daughter, who was born in July. I had a partner, Andy Deck, whom I’ve known since the SVA time. We worked together, and it was great. It was well attended. People would sit all around so that everybody was drawing the same site at Fort Jay but from a different point of view. We gave them a very basic apparatus to guide them with a hole inside so they could draw and see the scene at the same time, and there was a kind of grid. When you have a grid in front of a landscape, it flattens it, and it’s much easier to decide what you’re going to draw. It helped people who were thinking, I can’t do that, and gave them confidence to go for it. The site was like a village square inside of Fort Jay, so there were different perspectives. Afterward I put it all together as a flat drawing. Everybody’s style of drawing was stuck together. I thought it was interesting to mix that.

Drawing Circle. 2012. Day of the event at Fort Jay, Governors Island, New York.

Drawing Circle. 2012. Digital composite of the drawings gathered during the event, detail.

How did you get the participants?

We did that on the spot. I had invited a couple of friends to make sure there was a base, but we were about twenty, twenty-five people. We had to say no to some people. It was advertised on the island as a free event. It was a one-off, part of a festival to encourage people to draw called Draw Now! That’s why the Drawing Center was behind it.

Your Scream series was also on Governors Island.

That seems to be another part of my practice. My interest was technology and visualization—visualizing things as an artist that you cannot speak about or things that are difficult to describe, like a scream. Munch did it with his iconic scream painting. But without being so literal, I wanted to figure out if there was a way to differentiate between how people scream, if there was something in their personality that would show up in the way they scream. And scream being something so primal, I was interested in this human thing connected with technology.

How did you get people to participate?

The cool thing on the island is you have a perfect mix of people. You’ve got the art lovers who know about the arts organizations there; you’ve got people who have no idea what’s there, are just curious and have heard about it. Some people come for picnics; some come for birding. You’ve got different kinds of people, families, people of all ages, all backgrounds. That was fabulous. They either came across the booth or they heard someone screaming so they would come. That was good self-advertising. The experience of doing something like that in public seems like, Oh, I’m going to make a fool of myself. That was another fascination for me. Why are we so afraid of screaming when it’s really good for you to sometimes let it out? Originally the booth was supposed to be enclosed so people would have privacy. But it happened right at the onset of Covid, so I could not enclose anything safely. It had to be in the open air. Something I didn’t plan that happened was the performance aspect. People were quite happy to be seen. And then there was also catharsis. A lot of people would cry afterward, being really moved by what came out of them.

Scream Now Inside/Out. 2021. Sample screamer using the booth on Governors Island, New York.

You had several iterations of that project, from 2020 to 2023. Were you generating images on the computer for that first one?

Yes. What I didn’t have was a screen that I first planned to have all around the booth. But there was a little monitor inside, and people could see live what their scream was doing on the screen. That was basically a translation of different things in the sound manipulated on the computer through Max 8 software, which I worked on with someone for that specific setup.

Scream Now Inside/Out. 2022. Governors Island, New York.

Then I got funding to be able to have a bigger screen. It was on a projector inside the room. With the last iteration I started to deal with live synchronization. I’m still applying here and there to get the right funding. It does demand quite a bit of money to get it right. My dream is to have it on Times Square for the Midnight Moment digital public art program. At midnight they showcase an artist’s work on all the billboards in Times Square for one minute. Imagine if the booth is in the middle, someone screams and all the billboards showcase the scream images. That’s my dream.

You tend to revisit your projects to develop them further.

I think it has to do with the medium and technology, especially, because it’s taken me a while to perfect a project, the way I envisioned it. And this is not a field that’s so easy for me. I’m fascinated by it conceptually but to really get your hands dirty, I’m more comfortable with more traditional mediums. But because I’ve studied programming and all those things, I know it’s possible.

In explanations of your work, you reference the theoretical underpinnings in addition to descriptions of the work itself.

I think that’s because I’m looking for funds. You have to be able to explain things around your work if you want to apply for a residency or a grant. I had to get into the habit of that. It was not something I personally felt a need for. I didn’t go the commercial way of finding a gallery that would help me develop my work, like support me through exhibitions. I went through the not-for-profit kind of route, which means you have to do a lot of your own publicity and explain what your work is about so people can take the risk in funding your art. But it’s a great exercise as well, and it comes from school.

We had spoken about the influence of Georges Perec on your work, but I’m also interested in your referencing Kazimir Malevich because I don’t quite get that.

I think focusing on Malevich, looking at his trajectory in fine arts, reflects on my own. He was someone who really pushed the boundaries. He’s one of the artists who created abstraction in the 1910s. For him it was Suprematism, which he was developing along with other painters. He pushed the limits. Some would call it almost nihilism in the sense that he went so far as to go to a finite point where there’s nothing after that. For me that was Suprematist Composition: White on White, the white square on the white background, which occasioned my first visit to New York, to see it at MoMA. It was so moving, and after that I could not paint anymore. I didn’t see the point. That’s when I got interested in technology and animation and other means. So he’s very important for me in my own trajectory. Funnily enough, he went back to figurative painting afterwards. I think he had been to the end of the direction and came backwards to find another one. I admire that as well.

Homage to K.M. 2022. Buttercup petals on canvas, varnish, 20 inches x 20 inches.

I’ve seen examples of Perec’s influence on your work, especially categorization.

I think it comes first from a compulsive way, like people who collect. It’s a way to control the world around you when you feel you don’t have enough control. Perec did it for his own reasons. He lost his parents when he was very young. He was someone who was in search of belonging somewhere, connecting with a place especially. For him, cataloguing places was one of the big aspects of his work. When I saw that, I recognized something about that need and the desire to translate it into an artistic project.

Some of your projects have a lot of humor, but some are quite serious and you talk about difficult life experiences. I’d like to look at a humorous one because I just love it—Mortals from last year at A.I.R. Gallery’s 15th biennial, an installation of wheels made of wire mounted on a wall, each wheel representing a year and people in your sphere. That project also went through a number of iterations.

The first one was the one I did during the residency on Governors Island with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2011. The idea was to find a way to visualize everybody I’ve ever met since I was born. I’ve always kept lists of people I would meet. That would be significant to me. I would not do that every day. Every X number of years, I would go through my address book and note where I met that person. When this project came about, I had already done a previous project called Ten Years: A User’s Manual, which refers to one of Perec’s books, La Vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual). So there’s always a connection. I had at that point made lists of many things, including lists of people that I had met. I already had good research.

For this specific project, Mortals, I was interested in how to visualize three sets of information: the person, when I met them, and something about who they are and their connection to me. I think a lot of my work also has to do with the idea of solitude, the fact that you’re alone. And I think that’s one of the aspects that sometimes gets buried through the humor. So basically to define my relationship with all these people, I created a color coded way to signify whether this person was a friend, a lover, a family member, an enemy.

Mortals. 2011. Pins, threads, and stickers. Installation, LMCC gallery, Governors Island, New York.

I enjoyed the color key delineating the kind of friend they might be: boyfriend, best friend, close friend, good friend, friend.

Yes, because I thought that was important. I could not put everybody just as a friend. And then you have acquaintances and flirts. I thought that was funny because anybody can relate to that in their life. And I showed the span, at that time, 2011, of forty-plus years; when I updated it last year, it was fifty-plus years, so ten more wheels. And last year, instead of little colored pins to denote the relationship, I replaced that with flower petals because they have become such an important piece of my visual vocabulary. Flowers always are symbolic of something, so the colors became specific flowers to represent each relationship.

Mortals. 2023. Flower petals key, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, New York.

In the descriptions you’ve written for serious projects, you point to really dark aspects of your life, in particular, abuse. I’m wondering about your sharing that with the public.

I think it helps almost therapeutically to be able to speak the unspoken. It took me a long time to realize that was at work in my artwork. Flower petals literally gave me a way to express those things without using words or having something be too graphic or literal. They have the idea of strength, resilience, and also fragility and beauty. For me, that is very much like femininity. They became this perfect thing. Déflorée (Deflowered), which is a long series I started with flowers, referred to that idea of the first time. For me it was a traumatic experience, as it was for so many women I know.

Is that why you had a project of recorded stories about the first time people had intercourse?

Yes. I did one centering on me obviously. Then I did one piece where people could write down their first-time experience in a few sentences, and I started recording each response. I created this wall piece of flower petals, a gradient from white to red to dark red, and people could listen to other people’s stories and be inspired to write their own. I was surprised at the different answers I got. A lot of them were just boring, frankly, but a lot of people dared to speak about the experience because it was totally anonymous. It was always my voice on the recordings, and I changed the pitch so that you could not tell if it was a man or a woman. I thought it was important to give voice to everybody, not just women, because men sometimes had traumatic experiences. That was at NARS Foundation. I had originally asked artists I knew for stories, and I had about fifteen of those. During the show, there were at least forty more people contributing.

Défloré(e)s: Cornered. 2018. Rose petals, glue, 2 Bluetooth speakers, MP3 players, suggestion box, paper, and pens, 36 inches x 117 inches. NARS Foundation Artist Residency show, Brooklyn, New York.

That was a kind of public artwork as well.

Yes, there is something I always loved about being part of the public, and anything that helped the work become an experience for people a little more than just visual, exploring other ways for people to get more of their senses involved.

It seems with the Déflorée projects, you’re not involved as much with technology as you had been in earlier work.

The three-dimensional work, like the sculpture work I do, has reignited my interest to at least comment about technology. I’m not using technology per se, but there is a piece for instance in which one computer is covered by flower petals. That’s more conceptual than the work I do when it’s just 2D flowers, when I try to connect more with my subconscious and I have no predetermined composition, and I improvise. I love that practice as well. But in the 3D work, because you need more planning, I’m interested in seeing flower petals as a way to reconnect the human and the technological. The flowers, interestingly enough, are also man altered—we’ve created different kinds of flowers.

Flower Power. 2024. iMac 2009 (full HD), plaster cloth, flower petals, varnish, 25.5 inches x 20 inches x 8.5 inches.

I’ve been trying to figure out how you view the connection between the human and the mechanistic, which you point to in your writing.

I’m asking the question. I’m attracted to the idea that industrial times changed our way of doing things and our thinking. Just like AI will revolutionize our lives. I still want to include more technology. I haven’t found yet the best way for me; it’s part of the research of combining technological, natural, and human components together. In most of my work, I express something that I could not put in words, that people can look at and think, Yeah, that’s another way to look at things.

Before we speak about the individual flower projects, I’d like to know about how you handle the fragile flower petals.

I always loved flowers. My dad painted flowers and planted flowers. My mom continued after him. I didn’t realize that was so potent in my environment. I had to go back to France for my Fulbright. You have to go back to the country for two years before you can apply for a Green Card. I was forced back in France when my daughter was about two and a half, and when I was there, I disconnected with my art practice here in New York. The environment really changed me. That’s when I started drawing again, and I got interested in looking at flowers differently. So I started with photographs. I didn’t want to throw the flowers away, so I started pressing them, not knowing exactly what I would do. I came back to the U.S. with a bunch of envelopes full of petals, and that’s when I said, Let’s just experiment. I got that residency at NARS Foundation. I really wanted to do something different. That’s when I started using mostly roses because they’re the most resilient. When you press them, the water comes out of them, but they are very flat, and as I said resilient. They have a bit of plasticity; you can bend them a bit. I use medium, which is something you mix acrylic paint with to make it more fluid, and it’s something that respects the color, that’s not too chemically damaging. That allows me to make them soft, and they can be applied on the canvas or wood panels; they will stick to it. Some petals will eventually become all brown. The ones you use for dye, for instance, will stay, like some blues. I’m learning the ones that are going to be the most constant. Also I’m using a spray that’s a UV protection to slow the process of changing.

So that first project was at NARS.

That was the first Déflorée project, Défloré(e)s: Cornered, the two panels on walls that created a corner where people could listen to the stories of deflowering, with flowers going from dark red roses to white roses. As I was working with the petals, I was discovering things that were relevant for me. It was about consent, this idea that the first time, there’s so much pressure about it being the first time. About having to do it, what age you do it. Do you really want to do it. I was interested in exploring that. So Défloré(e)s Cornered—being cornered is not very positive. My experience gave some colors already, but I was open and searching for the good experiences as well.

Tell me the trajectory of the Déflorée series.

After this first piece, I had other residencies where I basically created pieces directly illustrating some of the stories. They inspired a bunch of pieces and generated ideas to create more pieces. Later, I had a solo show at NARS about those different stories. Based on those experiences, I started to explore my own story with the Déflorée Self series. That’s where I really started to free flow with all the kind of flowers, petals, dyes, colors, where before it was very planned ahead which flower I used and the symbol behind each of them.

Défloré(e)s Origins. 2020. Pressed flower petals, glue, cradled wood panel, 8 inches x 6 inches x 1 ⅝ inches each.

I did this one series that was one panel per kind of flower; this was Origins. It was basically trying to find the origin story connected to each of the flowers. The most obvious one is the tulip. That comes from Syria originally. The mythical stories connected to the creation of each flower often have to do with a princess that has to be sacrificed; so the name of the flower comes from that princess. It was interesting to see that a lot of the stories have to do with some kind of bad thing happening to young women—for instance, the lily, from a love affair that ends with the princess dying of sadness.

Déflorée Self. 2022. Flower petals, varnish, and UV protection on canvas, 36 inches x 48 inches.

But then with the Self series, I used the flowers as the visually beautiful element that they were. I wanted to let go and express something, to let go of control in a positive way. I did one series that was a little more constricted. I’m still working on that one, called Déflorée History. That goes back to each of the steps of my sexual life, as a child, as a young adult, as a mother. The last chapter is on maturity, after menopause and all that. Those are such different times in the life of a woman, and I thought it was interesting to work in that more intuitive way and use doodles, which again is a way to let the drawing come from your subconscious rather than trying to plan or conceptualize things.

Déflorée History, Childhood #1A & #1B. 2023. Flower petals, medium, paint markers, ballpoint pen on wood cradled panel, 48 inches x 60 inches x 3 inches each.

With those two together, the drawings and the petals, as almost a bit of therapy for myself as well, I try to express or let go of some of the difficult experiences as well as express some of the beauty. It’s hard to describe what it is to be a mother or just become one, those kind of things. All those unspoken aspects.

Infinite Drawing Therapy. 2024. Flower petals, medium, paint markers, ballpoint pen on 8 wood cradled panels, 72 inches x 48 inches x 1 inch.

Last year you began your tenure as the Visual Arts Chair, which is basically the director of the Westbeth Gallery. And you’ve got tremendous vision of what you want to do with the Gallery.

It came as a surprise but given the beautiful space and the community here and the potential, I said yes, not fully aware of how much work it would be. And I was warned: it’s a lot of work, it’s not paid, and everybody is going to hate you. It’s a lot of work, yes, and the pay would be great, because I really enjoy doing it. It’s like an extension of my practice in some ways. It has helped me look outside of my own practice and a little more closely into others; also curating shows, understanding better how to put together a show, what’s current, what’s interesting nowadays.

You curated and hung the show “Unnatural Processes.”

That was with seven other artists which I felt a kinship with in themes around this aspect of what we call the natural world. It’s a very contemporary subject, our environment in general.

Unnatural Processes. 2023. Group exhibition at the Westbeth Gallery in New York City.

I’m learning a lot with the Gallery, even about administrative things like insurance and how to deal with the Gallery. And there is definitely a little sense of importance; it’s nice to be in charge. I’m not going to deny that. As an artist sometimes you feel it’s so hard, you have to work so hard, you have to self-motivate all the time. You get a lot of rejection, way more than acceptances. There’s a nice kind of balance in the space where I’m in control in some respects, but I also collaborate, and I also serve this community, which I think is very important. Part of what I want to do in the Gallery is make sure for anybody who shows there that the context of Westbeth artists is always present—starting with the postcards, hoping to create some kind of archival material that people can look at when they’re in the Gallery, and also to acknowledge the legacy from the seventies, all the people who have shown, the artists, the important ones, the ones that are current and are still vibrant artists.

For more information about Valérie Hallier, go to valeriehallier.com.

Terry Stoller is a Westbeth resident and author of Tales of the Tricycle Theatre.

Profiles in Art, Copyright 2024 Terry Stoller and Westbeth Artists Residents Council