15/7/2009
Two solo shows
HSF, New York
Lovisa Ringborg exhibits 2 interrelated works. A photograph, Insomnia is the visual and conceptual counterpart of an environmental piece, If Your Secret Was an Animal What Animal Would It Be. The series of paintings presented by Italian artist Elena Ascari starts a new phase in her visual research. Curated by: Raffaele Bedarida and Teresa Meucci.
Curated by: Raffaele Bedarida and Teresa Meucci
LOVISA RINGBORG
if your secret was an animal
what animal would it be
Swedish artist Lovisa Ringborg exhibits at HSF two interrelated works. A
photograph, Insomnia is the visual and conceptual counterpart of an
environmental piece, If Your Secret Was an Animal What Animal Would It Be,
which consists of four photographs and a mirror text. More than doing
photographs, Ringborg literally works with photography: her initial
photographic shots, used as raw material (the artist's words), are
digitally altered and combined into carefully composed and theatrically
staged images. As with Caravaggio (a rough mattress hardly visible under
classical draperies), the fictionality of the represented scene is revealed
in her work, and the masquerade in the artist's studio emerges interfering
with the subject matter. Subtle visual inconsistencies insinuate
unreliability in the faux staged-photographs and add surreal echoes to their
content. But there is no attempt on shocking effects: no juxtaposition of
evidently incongruous images and meanings. If the sleep of Goya's reason
produced monsters, the inoffensive stuffed animals that Ringborg
photographed at the Museum of Natural History, are turned into the
elementary vocabulary of a potentially monstrous language. A language from
which narrative is removed and humans, beasts, and objects are kept frozen
on the threshold between familiar anxieties and uncanny premonitions. RB
ELENA ASCARI
Cells
The series of paintings presented by Italian artist Elena Ascari starts a
new phase in her visual research. Ascari's previous canvases portrayed the
reflecting world of the malls¹ escalators through a photorealist technique.
The shiny world of glasses and mirrors was turned into a no-less-kitschy
surface of gummy paint. The effect was one of complex visual fragmentation:
repetitions, reflections, and distortions of the same figures resulted in an
optical multiplication that could be read as an open sequence, a
deconstructed story. With Cells, Ascari does a step further. Focused on the
refracting skin of design objects, these new reflections destroy any
perceptive continuity. An ordinary experience given by the popularization
and domestication of Deconstructivist architecture is translated into a
trope: close-up views become miniaturized oneiric visions. In the resulting
kaleidoscope, humans as well as any other recognizable thing are fugacious
and isolated apparitions. The story no longer exists, connections are lost.
The aesthetic of very small reflective surfaces become, with Cells, a
metaphor for the connective isolation of the i-phone era. RB
Opening reception: July 16th 6.30-9.00 pm
HSF
128 W 121 Street - New York
Free admission