Solo exhibition - Nelson Bourrec Carter
1630 Revello Drive.
Sunnydale, California.
Anyone who grew up with Buffy Summers* would recognise this address instantly. Amidst a vampiric world, a place to regain strength, to find comfort, to call home.
As if under the Slayer’s spell, Nelson Bourrec Carter set off for California, camera in hand, in search of the buildings that staged the life of the TV show’s heroine. He captured her house, still standing decades after filming, half-hiding beneath plants cascading (Summer House, 2026). At times, as any fan would, the French American artist crossed into the frame himself. In front of Torrance High—laden with a generation’s teenage dramas**—he kissed the man he loves, tenderly communing with a place that cannot embrace him back (Sans Titre (Kisses), 2025). If his passion for Buffy led him to surviving façades, his interest in the movie Jumanji drew him inward. Recreating Alan Parrish’s house in CGI, he wandered through its emptied rooms—no vines, no stampede, no body, only a voice tracing desires the child he once was could not yet name (Adventurer Player One, 2025).
Printed on mirrors, laid across glass and steel, mounted edge-on or played on screen, these works move between photographic processes older than cinema and the contemporary techniques of digital rendering. In their shifting surfaces, they reflect what pop culture slyly lodges in us: what we long for, who we become and where we belong.
A decor is a decoy. If etymologically the words have nothing to do with one another—one descends from Latin ornament, the other from a Dutch duck trap—the ear knows better. Sets set us up. They lure you in with the promise of a life, then hold you to its script: this is what a home looks like, a family, an adolescence, a first kiss. Each of these scenes carries particular visions of race, class and sexuality—most often bourgeois, white and heteronormative—quietly presenting them as the natural way of inhabiting the world. Bourrec Carter returns to these images, attentive both to what they made possible and to what they left out. He moves beyond the frame, behind the scenes, among plywood and scaffolding, opening passages between the structures we inherit and the rooms we carve for ourselves.
In a wink to Buffy’s surname, the title of the exhibition conjures the fantasy of the summer house, and the peculiar feeling that, in this idealised season, anything might happen. Originally built as the Jüncke family’s summer villa, Goyki 3 offers an uncanny setting for these projections.
*the teenage heroine of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003).
**Buffy’s Sunnydale High, as well as the schools in Beverly Hills, 90210 and She’s All That.