NYAB Event - Laura Riboli "Proclivities"

This event has ended.
At Wallspace
Media: Photography, Video installation

This exhibition marks a new direction for Riboli. While earlier works used a combination of puppetry and animation to present minimalist objects as quasi-sentient beings moving of their own volition, Riboli's new works consider the uncanny physicality of the human form. Her three videos and related photographs explore the relationship between the body and geometry, enlisting actors to engage with the kinds of minimal shapes (a hoop, a ball, a triangle) that earlier works examined in isolation. Here, the body is presented as a site of abstraction.

In Rolls, Tosses, Rotations (ball), 2009 and Rolls, Passages, Rotations, Walkovers (hoop), 2009, Riboli places her once-animated objects into real-time relationships with the bodies that manipulate them. Using a pearlescent ball and hoop respectively, a lone figure, dressed in a simple grey leotard, interacts with these objects in a series of gymnastic movements that dialectically demarcate the figure’s form, and the contours of the object itself.

A third video focuses expressly on the site of interaction between the body and the object it manipulates. Shot with a camera at 120 frames per second and played back in slow motion, the object and hand perform quotidian movements to form a kind of minimalist choreography.

The photographic works crystallize these relationships, highlighting the abstract possibilities of both figure and object. Using a painted hand as a stand in for the human form, and nodding to Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie from 1966, Riboli records a series of minute gestures, creating a visual synecdoche of body and appendage.

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