Marina Ballo Charmet "At Land: Bodyscape & Cityscape"
Storefront for Art and Architecture
This event has ended.
The work of photographer and artist Marina Ballo Charmet, whose formal training is as a psychoanalyst, is centered on what she describes as "inattentive, unintentional observation, irrational and without direction". This retrospective exhibition, curated by critic and writer Jean-Francois Chevrier, presents a selection of photographic and video works produced since 1995 that investigate a variety of subjects ranging from the ordinary and the mundane in the urban landscape to the human figure. Ballo Charmet's work constitutes less an attempt to provide a pictorial rendition of these subjects than an endeavour to evoke the "unperceived" in our daily experiences. Her photographs of the urban landscape concentrates on shreds of the city: details of sidewalks, the upper levels of buildings that pulse in and out of the margins of our field of view; her exploration of the human figure concentrate on specific areas of the body, s uch as that between the breast and the mouth (the first field of view a baby becomes familiar with). The images featured in her Parks series ¬- an ongoing project that has taken her to public parks in Milan, London, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Madrid, Lisbon, Palermo and New York - are framed from a viewpoint close to the ground, revealing each park as its own universe. Ballo Charmet's work is less an exercise in representation of her chosen subjects - whether they be details of cities, urban landscapes, portions of the human figure or parkscapes - than an investigation of how we perceive them.
Marina Ballo Charmet was born in Milan, where she now lives and works. After graduating with a degree in Philosophy, she specialized in psychology and child psychoanalysis. Since the early 1980s she has worked as a psychotherapist for Milan's local health services department. From the mid-1980s on, she has also dedicated her energy to parallel projects and research involving photography and video.
[Image: Marina Ballo Charmet "At Land: Bodyscape & Cityscape" © the artist, Courtesy of Storefront for Art and Architecture]
Media
Schedule
from November 19, 2009 to January 09, 2010