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VIEWFINDER
2014 - ongoing charcoal on paper, cardboard, photography 50,5x72cm One of the challenges of this series was making variable drawings, where one can periodically interfere and change the work with simple folding, openings, closings that can alter the assembly. Inspired by some contemporary writings on memory (e.g. Daniel Schacter’s book "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers", Mariner Books, 2002), this project also refers on how our memory works. Each time we make the process of remembering we enrich our memories by adding or excluding aspects, according to our recent experience, intellectual background, emotional state, context, etc. With this series I revisit, from the present perspective, photographs that I took almost two decades ago. The viewfinder is a device on the camera that allows the user to select what the end image will show. Using a similar temporal viewfinder, I re-frame photographic fragments from a past reality into an abstract recent fiction. |
This joining explores multiple parameters: the way in which an image from the past is perceived in the present, different ways in which one can capture a situation using photography or drawing, the tactility of the surfaces, the relation between bi and tridimensional, etc.
The powerful lines and the architectural plans of the assembly make predominant use of folding with a double justification: the modal fold, as an extension of modulating photography into drawing and vice versa, and the functional fold as an articulation between bi and tridimensional. It’s almost as if someone from the past is trying to imitate future technology using the means and materials within their reach. What comes out is a simulacrum of that technology, a „cheap imitation” à la John Cage. But at the same time, the work becomes an intimate, naïve and pauper object that is profoundly subjective and humanized. Through the narrow slit of the double fold, "Viewfinder" series is an invitation to voyeurism and an upside-down skeuomorphism. |
