Opening on Thursday October 25th at 5pm. Exhibition from October 25th to November 2nd, Wednesday through Sunday, 1pm to 5pm.
For her site-specific residency, Brazilian artist Karina Montenegro offers us a poetic and sensible point of view, mainly inspired by her own experience as an individual and as an artist. In the beginning – a moment of tenderness with her young child in her arms, and a window looking at the garden of her home – perfectly geometric, but empty and dry. At this precise moment, Karina took a hold of the fact that the secure and isolated space of this room operates a spatio-temporal dislocation and imposes the impression of eternal existence, where one is never confronted to his/her wild state, nor to the existence of death. By standing up against the paradisiac metaphore of the garden, the artist reveals to us a singular vision that goes beyond the limits of the home, and reaches out to all human-created spaces and heterotopias – including the gallery and the computer.
« We are so much enclosed in this artificial comfort, in these limits, that we lost our vitality, the insticts, the primitive thinking. This is our dislocation. »
The work, O Jardim da minha casa (The garden of my home), focuses on this idea of the garden, this framed and controled piece of land, in which the notion of survival conscience or even the concrete image of death, drift away. In a gesture of mise-en-abyme, Karina Montenegro overlays over the exhibition space a suspended reflecting frame and a computer that generates vast geometric shapes, limiting our spatial perception to its electronic matrix. A motor, controlled by a precise timer, shifts the position of the suspended frame by pointing out clear spatio-temporal stops – a rigourous structure that brushes with the idea of perfect comfort, steril and eternal. It is at this exact point where the artist, in a very spontaneous way, reveals that there is a possible evasion, located in ourselves, in our will to make a step aside and to change perspective. Karina Montenegro concludes that in every journey all one could find is oneself !
