In the role of naturalists, architects and engineers, the artists in this show use the dialects of space and form as tools to launch their work towards critical issues regarding the structure and system of our environments. By drawing attention to the relationship between ourselves and our perceived coordinates, it is possible to create a fissure in the construction of what we take for granted.
In this exploration, dislocation heightens the awareness of the strangeness of our positions. The balance between imaginary and real, between human and natural, is exposed in its mutable states. Ultimately, the artists in this show transport us to places that are somehow familiar, yet blur the boundary between the natural and invented/constructed environment.
About the curators:
The works of Mayen Alcantara, Gabriela Salazar, and Martin Smick, approach the themes discussed above from multiple trajectories. Mayen has been employing a number of strategies that explore an expanded notion of what terrain is. Her work ranges from a video entitled "Alternate Kiosk" in which she's mapping locations within the Providence Place Mall using a lexicon of body movements derived from bees to a planned site specific, outdoor installation of solar powered led lights that "re-contours" the topography of a section of the Fidelity campus based on a re-imagined history of how the land has changed over contemporary and geologic time in response to use and natural forces.
In Gabriela's work, the desire to map the individual in a space or landscape is entwined with the systems that sustain and reshape the landscape, specifically the structure of Manhattan and the geology of the Catskills as linked by the New York City Water System. In her recent work, "Prop," she literally locates the body by referencing a human-sized object-furniture and bedding-while playing with the formal possibilities of implying landscape with a shift in scale.
Martin's work explores the area that exists between natural forms and the human-made. In "split-dimension," the artist juxtaposes the painted wood surface with floating matter. The dislocation that is created in this opposition of spaces and forms should make the viewer more aware of the strangeness of their position between these two places. Likewise "Interface," depicts a form that does not completely reveal itself as naturally or human made, invoking an uncertainty and dislocation on the part of the viewer.
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