Core, 2000
Core is an offspring of Correspondence using photography as a medium. The strong physicality of the barrels, exhibited in Correspondence now gives way to a metaphysic of interiority.
Previously, the barrels kept hidden those red landscapes of olive pits that the viewer would discover when bending over and peeping though the small opening cut into the thick plastic lids of the barrels.
It so happened that during my pregnancy I transferred this period of personal introspection onto the enclosed space of the barrel and that slowly the gaze became the empiric process of a vain endeavor to grasp the essence of that visual world. The more obsessive the quest toward an ontological understanding of the phenomenon, the more the latter eluded all definition.
And as all distinctions between inner/outer, micro/macro, origin/end, implosion/explosion, linear time/cosmic time, finite/infinite, collapsed, my gaze became a vehicle recording those images occurring in that confined territory delimited by the barrel.
The loss of materiality resulting from the photographic medium I had chosen this time, a monocular lens and a disembodied gaze, looking through a peephole, induced me to work on the space of the gallery as a necessary complement. I sensed that the added walls would fragment the space into smaller, intimate yet interconnected spaces, physically influencing the viewer’s movement throughout the gallery and therefore bringing back his/her body. That same physical fragmentation of the space extends itself to the vision as it hinders a panoramic viewing of the exhibition, allowing for some areas to remain hidden from the gaze. Thinking the space in that way reconnected me to previous works executed in the early 90’s when spatial partitioning was part of my artistic vocabulary.
January 2000