Antonia Carrara
09 Apr - 14 May 2011
ANTONIA CARRARA
The Go-Between
9 April - 14 May, 2011
Doubles, mirror images and startling connections form the fabric of the exhibition The Go-Between by Antonia Carrara (b. 1982, Rome). A wooden partition, supported by slabs of faux marble, creates the illusion of a discontinuity in space, forming, as it were, the sculptural embodiment of its own underlying principle. The objects and posters to the left and right of this partition are like each other’s estranged doppelgangers, playing with the idea of their reflection, impossible as it is. For instance, the title work, "The Go-Between” (2010), shows the pivotal illustration from Jacques Cazotte’s book Le Diable Amoureux (1772), in which the devil’s words become visible only in a mirror image. But what is really reflected in the mirror?
A young man named Walter Benjamin gives a guided tour of Comacina, the island in Lake Como; “Secret Portrait with W.B.” (2010) unveils associations between nature, architecture and history. In this two-channel film installation, partly in black and white and partly in colour, images unspool of the ruins of rationalistic homes for modern artists, built on Mussolini’s orders in the 1930s and now overrun by nature. The voice-over tells us, “A good piece of architecture is like a four leaf clover; first of all, you don’t get four leaf clovers any other season. They are rare and only reveal themselves at some specific moments in history”.
Chance and luck, or even magic, both form and expose the concealed affinities between rationality, irrationality, nature and history, and also between Walter Benjamin the tour guide and the renowned cultural historian of the same name. Never purely formal or purely conceptual, Carrara's work inhabits a diverse and dynamic field of visual, literary and artistic allusions.
[Laurie Cluitmans]
The Go-Between
9 April - 14 May, 2011
Doubles, mirror images and startling connections form the fabric of the exhibition The Go-Between by Antonia Carrara (b. 1982, Rome). A wooden partition, supported by slabs of faux marble, creates the illusion of a discontinuity in space, forming, as it were, the sculptural embodiment of its own underlying principle. The objects and posters to the left and right of this partition are like each other’s estranged doppelgangers, playing with the idea of their reflection, impossible as it is. For instance, the title work, "The Go-Between” (2010), shows the pivotal illustration from Jacques Cazotte’s book Le Diable Amoureux (1772), in which the devil’s words become visible only in a mirror image. But what is really reflected in the mirror?
A young man named Walter Benjamin gives a guided tour of Comacina, the island in Lake Como; “Secret Portrait with W.B.” (2010) unveils associations between nature, architecture and history. In this two-channel film installation, partly in black and white and partly in colour, images unspool of the ruins of rationalistic homes for modern artists, built on Mussolini’s orders in the 1930s and now overrun by nature. The voice-over tells us, “A good piece of architecture is like a four leaf clover; first of all, you don’t get four leaf clovers any other season. They are rare and only reveal themselves at some specific moments in history”.
Chance and luck, or even magic, both form and expose the concealed affinities between rationality, irrationality, nature and history, and also between Walter Benjamin the tour guide and the renowned cultural historian of the same name. Never purely formal or purely conceptual, Carrara's work inhabits a diverse and dynamic field of visual, literary and artistic allusions.
[Laurie Cluitmans]