Paratext #43: M. Lawton, P. Bruna, J. Gorostidi, M. Pecchioli, P. Maisel, N. Dominguez
POSTPONED ACTIVITY. NEW DATE TO BE CONFIRMED.
This name, Paratext, hides a monthly schedule of presentations of artists residing in Hangar of long and short duration, as well as international residencies. In it they present, in different formats, specific projects or parts of their work. The sessions are always open to the public with the purpose of enabling interaction with the artists themselves. In addition, each Paratext has an editor who later publishes his or her impressions of the presentation on this blog. On this occasion the editor will be Blanca del Río Pérez.
The next Paratext session will take place on Wednesday March 25, at 6 p.m. in the Sala Ricson of Hangar.
Projects will be presented by:
Michael Lawton is an artist working with painting and writing. He uses abstraction to narrate verbal, lived or speculative moments; the instant the phosphorescent ash cloud solidified around the town of Pompeii for instance, or the moment our distant ancestors crawled from the primordial swamp 3.8 billion years ago. He writes about the very same moments; when the sensorial overtakes the cerebral, sometimes inventing or swapping languages to do so, setting these texts in alternative presents or counterfactual futures.
Paula Bruna’s artistic research stems from the study of the conflict between a society based on economic growth and the limited nature of the medium that sustains it. Taking as a reference concepts of ecology, sustainability and ecological economy, Paula is interested in the games of tensions between society and the environment and the process of collapse in all its phases (from the instability of equilibrium prior to the post -colapso scenario). In her installations she uses everyday elements to represent and investigate these issues in the form of visual poetry. In her latest projects, she investigates the conformation of the anthropocene narrative from a non-human point of view, in a broader ecosystemic conception exercise.
Working in the fields of video, performance and installation, Gorostidi develops long and short term projects that examine the role of subjectivity in the construction and representation of the Self and that explore the questions of Identity as being a product of our social structures and relations. Often employing automatic and collaborative creation techniques resembling “Exquisite corpse” or “Chinese whisper”, she produces multi-layered works which interrogate the idea of “the original Self” and deconstruct the contemporary notions of authenticity, autonomy, identity and Otherness.
Her artistic research is on the body as tool to investigate political and ethical contexts activating social and aesthetic practices. Her recent projects are related to gentrification impact on local community, gender issues and queer culture.
She adopts different aesthetic languages (filmmaking, sound installations, performing arts) to build a knowledge based on engagement, self care, and community building. This process is an intimate and public form of resilience.
Maisel’s working practice explores the language of photography through sculpture, collage, and photographic objects. Subverting the viewer’s own visual literacy and expectations of photographic space, he provokes a reevaluation of both the use value and two-dimensionality of the medium.
Maisel collects everyday materials from specific geographic locales, utilizing them to create sculptural arrangements in shallow spaces in the studio. He then photographs the arrangements, continuously readjusting and rephotographing the materials in place, resulting in iterative sequences that recontextualize the various histories of the materials. As the same objects are reoriented through a series of images, the elements gain distinct visual traction through their repetition and reappearance in multiple works.
Maisel’s still lives are often composed of dead-stock paper, reused building and architectural materials, mirrors, and various photographs – family photos, found imagery, and the artist’s own snapshots. Through the act of rephotographing, a leveling occurs between the images and materials. The significant and the arbitrary, the mundane and revelatory are all abstracted through the remove of the camera and the flattening of space. The subjectivity of the embedded images and materials functions in contrast to their apparent formalism.
Maisel uses ambiguous perspective, angular compositions, and abstracted forms to both focus attention on the surface of the print as well as the depicted space of the image. He also reintroduces dimensionality to the picture plane through adding cuts, drawing, painting, and collage to most but not all prints, resulting in a push and pull between two and three dimensions.
Natalia Domínguez has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Granada, she has studied at the Fontys Hogeschool voor of Kunsten in Tilburg, Holland, and she has a Master’s degree in research and artistic production from the Polytechnic University of Valencia.
Her artistic concern arises from her interest in the analysis of the symbol as a container of meaning and how it helps us to conceive the space around us. She feels more faithful to the concept than to the form and ideas such as the need for symbolic communication and the questioning of the utility of the artistic object are quite recurrent in her work, so that on many occasions she ends up questioning the very nature of art and the hierarchical codes that make it up.
Supported by:
Categories: Paratext |
