Dear Shaded Viewers,
There’s no better time than the present to ponder the traces we are leaving behind as human beings.
More than ever we are vocalizing, disrupting, and capitalizing on our notions of life—in the past, present and future. Political narratives and societal norms necessitating the need for new territory. To shake the old we need to just off the past, because it is impossible to erase and necessary to conserve, to remember.
In discourse we can take steps forward. In tone we can achieve delivery.
Art presents that medium, an unassuming garage, an unbiased arrangement…
Enter artists:
Maria Appleton, Dalia Baassiri, Kara Chin, Nicolas Faubert, Gabriel Moraes Aquino, Léo Fourdrinier, Arthur Hoffmann, Jan Melka, Lorenzo Monnini, Felipe Romero Beltrán and Romain Vicari.
Melka’s cabin of survival catches your attention as soon as you walk in, you need to know what is inside, its the details that hold you, every blink of an eye shows something new. A message to decipher.
See Appletons’s figurative representation of the network of our minds as impressionable as the the images we are exposed to visually daily.
Monnini suspends political ideas to create visual iconographies, you have to look twice and it’s there presenting itself in details.
Beltrán questions identify and immigration via a series of candid impressionable moments captured on film.
The ephemeral soap sculptures of Baassiri, captured in drawing, offering an emotional replica of political and economic pain in the space of a sink, watch the foam give you a sense of the dissolution of identity
Feel tension expressed in Chin’s animated presentation. An ambiguity between real and virtual space. In conveying her inspiration for her creations, she explained it as a way to frame the way she navigates tension in real life. As you step close to the shaking table you can sense an imperceptible message one that stays with you long after you’ve walked away—a haunting ambiguity.
Foudrinier’s supernatural aesthetic beckons you at first with the flowers and golden antique glimmers, inch closer and you see a fossilized stone with Haviana bands a perfect conception of perceptions on contemporary implications. Those flowers are sprouting out of an ancient headcast.
The chaos in Hoffmann’s installation sacralizes popular objects by giving our eyes a feast of colors and you see poetry in matter through Vicari—an androgynous dream of candles, butterfly videos, and golden pillows set amongst a void of industrial waste.
It’s the dance by Faubert and Aquino, that provides the finale, holding a mirror to society, dance to express, dance to shake the dust, to wake the garage.
In the words of the late Sam Gilliam on art, “Your actions are about the transformation of the whole of the human experience…it’s visual communication, and it’a also emotional and ritual. It’s a form of being alive.”
I’ll leave you with this question: what trace do we really want to leave?
Later,
Nafiseh
