La Perrerra, Santiago / Chile 2013
YESSR & Canadian Curator Guy Berube present
POST MORTEM / International Collaboration
November 1 – 30, 2013
Vernissage Friday November 1 / 8 – 11pm
@ La Perrera / Santiago, Chile
Workshop: www.lapetitemortgallery.co
LIVE Performance Art by Toronto artist Aleks Bartosik.
*
STATEMENT:
The Post Mortem concept is conventionally associated with a mournful imagery, corresponding to an idea of uncertainty towards a dimension that is still unknown to us. The after death is not necessarily a tragic element once the origin of its condition is dissected and understood. In our own living bodies, we can extend our experiential and spiritual limits if we assume a loss of the physical self and meditate on what this loss could unveil.
*
Post Mortem / YESSR6 reviews the concept of death, questioning its meaning, to redefine it as a portal or as a beginning of a new process, as parallel reality or even as the lasting end of the sense experience. That the selected works position dead, or seemingly dying subjects in the light, and to-be-viewed provides for them a new kind of life-energy. Although many of the works can be read as mementos, they go further in revealing the passage of fragments of memory through space and time – not simply through disembodied remembrances, but through continual and limitless acts of psychic restoration and re-creation. As such, the exhibition operates with sensitivity to how the post mortem can find presence in absence, as both an offering as withdrawal.
*
In this way, we can read ‘death’ through subjects that are not dead, gone or even transitioning. The post mortem, then, is sensed or read intuitively through our lived bodies through the positioning of the given subject. Although we invariably carry within ourselves the weight of systematic, culturally produced ‘death signifiers’ and meaning systems, our readings of these works rest more on an acquired personal sensitivity and emotional intelligence to form and incident. Through this lens we become conscious of the ‘life’ versus ‘death’ binary, and in turn, come to measure the instability and impossibility in holding between them an imaginary sense of distance.
*
CO-CURATOR FELIPE BRACELIS’ SELECTION OF ARTISTS:
* Adolfo Bimer, Santiago, Chile
* Lautaro Veloso, Santiago, Chile
* Gabriela Rivera, Santiago, Chile
* Rosita Beas Capllonch, Santiago, Chile
* Jose Badia Berner, Santiago, Chile
* Jose Pedro Godoy, Santiago, Chile
* Felipe Bracelis, Santiago, Chile
* Antonio Becerro / Jorge Aceituno, Santiago, Chile
* Ivan Olivares Laferte, Santiago, Chile
* Cristobal Traslaviña, Santiago, Chile
*
CO-CURATOR GUY BERUBE’S SELECTION OF ARTISTS:
* Peter Shmelzer, Ottawa, Canada
* Ashkan Honarvar, Iran
* Francois Escalmel, Montreal, Canada
* Derek Stefanuk, Montreal, Canada
* Aleks Bartosik, Toronto, Canada
* Saddo, Bucharest, Romania
* Matthew Stradling, London, England
* Gonzalo Bénard, Paris, France
* Whitney Lewis-Smith, Ottawa, Canada
* Andrew Salgado, London, England
*
LIVE PERFORMANCE:
Aleks Bartosik – drawing/painting performance
Into the Light (2013)
*
Aleks Bartosik artistic practice focuses on the human form, where she combines drawing elements with painting, performance, sculpture, installation, and film/video. Bartosik explores the boundaries between the real and the imaginary and investigate one’s ability and willingness to imagine, pretend, dream and suspend disbelief.
For the Post Mortem exhibition Bartosik will further investigate the realms that she creates and portrays within her two-dimensional work, this time through a site-specific performance. Into the Light, a performance specifically created for this exhibition, Bartosik will draw and paint on the suspended sheets of paper from the gallery’s ceiling. The hung paper will resemble a spiral-like structure or a maze where the viewer will be able to enter or walk through it once the performance is finished. Bartosik will focus on creating drawings that will narrate the paper structure while giving the viewer a more intimate glance at the work when within it. Into the Light will imitate the imagined tunnel that each being takes before passing, or rather, as they are ‘passing.’
*
*
Thank you,
*
Guy Berube