Maggie Cardelús
31 May - 30 Jun 2007
MAGGIE CARDELÚS
"Looking for time"
Galeria Fucares is proud to present a solo show by Maggie Cardelùs. The corpus of the artist can be understood as a large photo album in constant process of becoming, exploring the connection between the photographic image, time and memory.
The various works presented in the exhibition, Looking for time, continue to develop this underlying project while presenting new investigations. Until now the physical confrontation of the artist with the photographic image has been concentrated upon the manual action of the ‘cut’ – by which the images, chosen from Cardelùs’ personal archive, were modified, printed in various formats, cut and thereby transformed into photographic sculptures, giving life to grand-scale, three-dimensional installations. In this exhibition we see other processes coming to the foreground: projection, movement, montage and duration. Time is the protagonist of this exhibition. A single photographic image, the crystallization of a fraction of a moment, is dilated to the extreme in a video. Thousands upon thousands of photographs are organized into a sequence that plays for ten years. The fading memory of the past entrusted to an ephemeral paper support, contrasts with a future time created in a digital frame piece whereby the artist connects herself to its owner by a contracted agreement for the entirety of her life.
Zoo, age 10 is a video that lasts ten years: eighteen-thousand photographs shot and collected by the artist between March 25, 1996 and March 26, 2006 are projected at the speed of twelve shots per second. Together these images give life to a portrait of a ten year-old child named Zoo. The video is accompanied by a re-elaborated version Beethoven’s first movement from Pastoral, expanded here into the duration of ten hours.
Looking for time is a video from a single image from 1996. Through long sequence shots and sudden jump-cuts the image – a room reflected in a mirror in front of which we see the artist obliterated by the glare of a flash – is explored gradually, with a ‘tactile’ vision. This vision, connected to the surface of things, discovers details that recall the origins of photography: Daguerre’s still-life’s, Fox Talbot’s window, the mirror to which many of the first photographs were compared. One of the objects seen in the reflected image is a ceramic jug. This object is ‘extracted’ from the mirror, reproduced in three-dimensional form and then covered in a reflective surface. The ceramic object recalls the materials of archeology and thus, alludes to an ‘excavation’ within the strata of time.
Mervyn, an expanding portrait is a photographic portrait presented in a digital frame connected to an Internet site. A contract commits the artist to send images from the site to the digital frame until her death. A paper copy of the first image is preserved in the drawer at the base of the frame, while the subsequent images – whose frequency and content are decided by the artist – will contribute to the expansion of Mervyn’s portrait, now a small child. The last image sent by the artist before her death will be preserved in the drawer along with the first, after which the frame will be turned off definitively.
"Looking for time"
Galeria Fucares is proud to present a solo show by Maggie Cardelùs. The corpus of the artist can be understood as a large photo album in constant process of becoming, exploring the connection between the photographic image, time and memory.
The various works presented in the exhibition, Looking for time, continue to develop this underlying project while presenting new investigations. Until now the physical confrontation of the artist with the photographic image has been concentrated upon the manual action of the ‘cut’ – by which the images, chosen from Cardelùs’ personal archive, were modified, printed in various formats, cut and thereby transformed into photographic sculptures, giving life to grand-scale, three-dimensional installations. In this exhibition we see other processes coming to the foreground: projection, movement, montage and duration. Time is the protagonist of this exhibition. A single photographic image, the crystallization of a fraction of a moment, is dilated to the extreme in a video. Thousands upon thousands of photographs are organized into a sequence that plays for ten years. The fading memory of the past entrusted to an ephemeral paper support, contrasts with a future time created in a digital frame piece whereby the artist connects herself to its owner by a contracted agreement for the entirety of her life.
Zoo, age 10 is a video that lasts ten years: eighteen-thousand photographs shot and collected by the artist between March 25, 1996 and March 26, 2006 are projected at the speed of twelve shots per second. Together these images give life to a portrait of a ten year-old child named Zoo. The video is accompanied by a re-elaborated version Beethoven’s first movement from Pastoral, expanded here into the duration of ten hours.
Looking for time is a video from a single image from 1996. Through long sequence shots and sudden jump-cuts the image – a room reflected in a mirror in front of which we see the artist obliterated by the glare of a flash – is explored gradually, with a ‘tactile’ vision. This vision, connected to the surface of things, discovers details that recall the origins of photography: Daguerre’s still-life’s, Fox Talbot’s window, the mirror to which many of the first photographs were compared. One of the objects seen in the reflected image is a ceramic jug. This object is ‘extracted’ from the mirror, reproduced in three-dimensional form and then covered in a reflective surface. The ceramic object recalls the materials of archeology and thus, alludes to an ‘excavation’ within the strata of time.
Mervyn, an expanding portrait is a photographic portrait presented in a digital frame connected to an Internet site. A contract commits the artist to send images from the site to the digital frame until her death. A paper copy of the first image is preserved in the drawer at the base of the frame, while the subsequent images – whose frequency and content are decided by the artist – will contribute to the expansion of Mervyn’s portrait, now a small child. The last image sent by the artist before her death will be preserved in the drawer along with the first, after which the frame will be turned off definitively.