Camila Cañeque “synonyms”

Soho20 Chelsea Gallery

This event has ended.

SOHO20 presents synonyms, a project by Camila Cañeque for the +/- Project Space, the first of the 2017/2018 exhibition season.

In a room, one encounters a piece of ground, likely urban, or at least human made. The ground is recessed in the center, and it is filled with standing water – what some would call a puddle. Without a clear beginning or end, this water is stagnant, waiting. In the surface of the dark, still water, one finds the world’s very first mirror.

Generally speaking, synonyms are comparisons of language that we search for when we encounter the inability for a word to truly describe. Likely the word that we are searching for, in all of its complex specificity, does not exist, so we carve out in-between spaces in the syntax of many words. By aggregating words with rhizomatic similarities, maybe we will begin to approach the meaning.

Building off of Cañeque’s recent work addressing passivity, this new work is the first to use a non-human actant to embody inaction. While recent works have used the space of the floor or the ground to hold her body, this piece of ground with water inside takes her place enacting stillness. Her deadpan humor toys with archetypes, isolating existing physicalities to explore an already existing wealth of associations. Through this isolation, she also toys with a viewer’s patience. Using the notion of the in-between, she creates a space that is neither above nor below, before nor after. As viewers, we are made to endure the process of waiting with her, suggesting that any trace of conclusiveness will continue to evade us.