"Ceremonies of Summer" Exhibition
Frederico Sève Gallery/latincollector
This event has ended.
Ceremonies of Summer is a multimedia exhibition curated by Mónica Espinel. The exhibition is an homage to Marta Traba, critic, author, curator and historian, and was inspired by her first novel “Las ceremonias del verano” published in 1966. The show includes an eclectic group of artists whose work explores the polarities between transience and being present and the ephimerality of experience and its residues.
The book is a highly introspective chronicle about time, heightened awareness and self-discovery, told through an almost maniacal depiction of the colors, sounds and smells of different cities in summertime and through the character’s restless search for a place to call home. In a pseudo-autobiographical manner, Traba recorded her encounters with people and the feelings aroused during her travels in an array of reminisced and imagined cities including Buenos Aires, Paris, New York and Bogotá. Traba explores the ways in which we mediate and construct our environment and establishes a tenuous balance between the here and now, including the physicality and transience of our surroundings. Her writing serves as a kind of wandering and addresses the fascinating question of emigration and self-definition, creating a space where imaginary flight, the past, personal narrative and critique all intersect in a kaleidoscopic flow of places and emotions.
“Las ceremonias del verano” created an ideal departure point to bring together artists whose work is self-reflexive and exudes similar sensibilities. Angela Freiberger’s Mood Swings, a marble sculpture and video, explores the palpability of a trace and the malleability of place and time; the black & white photographs of André Cypriano and Miguel Rio Branco depict contemplation beatified by solitude; Lina Gonzalez’s sculpture Migrar presents a double edged chronicle of departure; Luis Cantillo’s animation 21 Sundays depicts the soporific state of an individual’s ruminations in the desert; Lishan Chang’s large-scale collages depict the unrelenting disfiguration of traveled landscapes; Soledad Arias’ you are here flickers incandescent palpitations, subtle reminders that the present is both a moment of stasis and suspension.
Love like With And Low, like I dug, an installation by Sebastián Patané Masuelli is about a woman whose heightened susceptibility to stimuli threatens her everyday with an inability to deal with fragmentary and unresolved experience. Similarly, Santiago Picatoste’s hyperbolized paintings of flowers are pictorial elaborations of the derangement of the senses and are juxtaposed to drawings by Jorge Julián Aristizábal like Hairy Ladder, which reinvent and challenge our perception of known objects evoking latent meanings.
[Image: Angela Freiberger "Mood Swings" (2007) HD video and carrara marble, 8 x 17 x 2 in.]
Media
Schedule
from July 17, 2008 to September 06, 2008