Wonder Wall. First Phase: Promise.
To explain the lay out of my exhibition I divided this section in 3 parts: the first one with photos of some general views of the exhibition and a link to the video in the last photo. The second one, we´ll see 6 framed drawings ( an ellipsis between the initial and the final work). And in the third one, information about the texts on the Wall.
Wonder Wall/ Promise. Installation view
Wonder Wall /Promise. 6 conclusives Works.
6 conclusive works in their installation in the room and details about each of them. (watercolor and pencil on mylar. 62x46cm)
Promise. 10 clips about the intentions and shifts in the process.
Promise. 10 clips about the intentions and shifts in the process.
Promise. Map of 12 text inserts.
Beauty (1). (Soviet Modernism/The Un-know History). It appears that these buildings send out a distress call to their own schedule of uses, a “setback” of the rationalist utopia toward nostalgia; they are redrawn through a play of self-absorption on their façades, with no more ado their lips are painted and made up in pastels; they cross dress their original design and ideology. They seem to be doubtful where to finally place their beauty….” they hide to put on make up before leaving the family home.
Utopia and Nostalgia (2). (Soviet Modernism/The Unknow History). The function of the buildings in this book is immersed in ornament, and it is sometimes literally distorted by the individual illusion of significance, of “invention”. The latter quality gives a Twist to rationalism, collapses its role and sends it directly off to childhood. It is interesting how reinforced concrete, which is such a raw adult material, is recoloured in Russia with the imprecision of a child with a crayon in its hand (and those pastel colours take you to other places while you’re waiting for the bus…)
Shyness (3). Beneath the Mylar foil glazing the building becomes confidential, its architecture transforms into echo. This is as much due to blur –the shyness of this foil- as to my structural games, which reorganize it within a calamitous dance of symmetries, balances and imbalances.
Mathematical Justice (4). … on the way back on the bus I would fall into self-indulgence and confusion; I slept and woke in miniature portions, I wondered how I was going to distribute those hundreds of copies of the building on the wall. I created all kinds of scales and symmetries; I understood that the lust of self-pity had found the way. My excesses of indulgence towards my own or others’ errors branched out over the wall within an exponential phenomenon, a species of mathematical justice that reconciled me.
Play of Mirrors (5). (The crazy life of symmetries). Like a patient I redrew different buildings from the book, my approach bordering on therapy; waiting for some “symptom” to manifest itself. Weariness always lacks mobility; looking in the mirror, you symmetrize yourself, vaguely expanding to find out how much space to occupy. You can spend a long time turning into an automaton before the teacher pronounces “your name”.
Twist (6). The dance of the Twist possesses a highly expressive rotation. But then it has asymmetry towards the other side, a rebound. The twist counter-rotates. It is premonitory of an enclosed fictitious space; it has a limit that, if infringed, involves failure. It puts a limit on itself observing margins of movement where it repeats itself in perpetuity. The Twist can be danced without music, because its true music is yet to be discovered.
Self-Pity (7).… there were months when my day to day doubled and the weekends were symmetrized; this happened during the free time that the “stressful work circumstance” left me. That winter I occupied myself making photocopies of the image of the two-page spread of the head offices of the Central Bank of Georgia(Soviet Modernism/The Unknown History), making them at different scales with my star device –the Cannon IRC4980photocopier. I created all kinds of self-pitying images of the edifice and -why not come out and say it?-as I was doing it I felt rather sorry for myself.
Promise (8). I used these transcended geometries as modules to construct meshes of personal Promise, in which I repeated and extended the geometries emancipated from the building into a field of life of their own. Initially these meshes were lattices in different colours, croplands with no intention. Later I incorporated them along with other resources as language for the Mylar layer.
Re-architecture (9). When symmetrized and restructured, the building housing the headquarters of the Bank of Georgia loses reality, a “belonging to an architectural or historical place”, and settles into another era to be cherished (or required)… where its form may provide accompaniment, though it might only mean being revived –(as in my case)- as an object of projection; a support for personal emancipation in the face of life’s brutality
Combustión (10). A Mylar blur makes the building confidential while its forms beat and dance. A dance of soot and prejudices poured into symmetries, balances and imbalances.
Delay (11). the mural is an active-wait. A wait in which the patient redraws the buildings with a gesture bordering on therapy. Adds texts, multiplies their structures, recolours them; creates a sort of somnambulist transcendence from their image. They are works of tedium or exhaustion / automatisms that are produced on newspaper photos whilst awaiting the moment to enter or leave something “One waits in style in a special room”.
Mylar Paper-2 (12). One night I had a Dorian Gray fantasy that my work would self-compose into a kind of magic phenomenon in which some “successful” elements would float towards the Mylar paper layer; but in the day-to-day I understand this layer as a surface of ice. On the latter material I work on the photocopies that I had composed without control during the self-indulgent months, I do it from the distancing furnished by the Mylar layer, on which I chill and reorganize my previous “expressive states”.