Anna Virnich: Nervous Moments Membranes
Chantal Peñalosa: El panorama, sobre todo si uno lo ve desde un puente, es prometedor
March 17–April 23, 2016
Proyectos Monclova
Colima 55, Col. Roma Norte
06700 Mexico City
proyectosmonclova.com
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Anna Virnich
Nervous Moments Membranes
Anna Virnich’s artistic practice focuses on textile-based tableaus, incorporating found fabrics as well as new materials, which the artist stretches on wooden frames thus creating organic and almost painterly compositions that oscillate between transparency and density, foreground and background, agility and standstill.
The tension between all those elements is crucial and it expresses itself not only within the composition of the tableaus and through the layering of various textures, but also in the physicality of the used material itself. The roughness of a leather-cut-out meets the delicacy of sewn silk. The perceptible force—transmitted by Virnich’s gesture of stretching—finds its counterpart in the simultaneous resonance of fragility, lightness and flux immanent to the work.
The tableaus presented in Nervous Moments Membranes are a result of the artist’s residency in Mexico City over the past months. They combine a variety of materials, such as mantillas, snake skin, silk and rayon, ranging from the early 1920s until today. Some of those elements are worn and feature traces of use: weather stains, dirt marks, human sweat and rips. They bear an unknown history, a memory, which from our perspective becomes only a potential narrative, a trace of existence. The exhibition is complemented by You change the smell of my sweat (2016), an installation that combines sound, scent, light manipulations, as well as objects, and emphasizes the sensual, which only becomes evident through our own presence. The installation bears a moment of irritation thus making our own physicality become its protagonist.
Anna Virnich (1984, lives and works in Berlin, Germany)
Chantal Peñalosa
El panorama, sobre todo si uno lo ve desde un puente, es prometedor
In the midst of the maelstrom of desires produced by imagination, one can make an analytic distinction between those that are achievable and others that, due to physical or moral conditions, turn into mere illusions. The exhibition El panorama, sobre todo si uno lo ve desde un puente, es prometedor (The view, especially if one looks at it from a bridge, is promising) belongs to the first category. Here, Chantal Peñalosa (Tecate, Mexico, 1987) enables the unfolding of a common desire through her work entitled La idea de un millón de pesos (The idea of a million pesos).
In a repetitive gesture that finds in “frottage” its means of expression, the desiring subject accumulates coins on letter size paper sheets. Each template contains fourteen pesos, while the installation in the exhibition features approximately three thousand sheets. What we see here is barely a small percentage of the process to reach the million. Thus, money becomes a metaphor of desire itself, of repetition and the constant sacrifice that we perform. Looking beyond the limit of the rhetorical figure, we find everyday life: desire implies labour, one of the main concerns in Peñalosa’s artistic practice. Desire is a force that leads to an action that in turn results in labour. How many hours will it take the artist to draw enough coins to achieve a million? Is the effort proportional to its result? What do we actually work for?
What seems to be a poetic and almost philosophical investigation of desire and its manifestation, finds a sudden interruption within a materialistic gesture. While visiting the installation and discovering all the details and differences between the countless representations of the coin, we will reach an empty, almost theatrical setting, with a wooden table and a chair. There, we will discover a pair of sheets representing 28 pesos. On a daily basis, the quantity represented on those sheets will be modified according to the exchange rate between Mexican pesos and American dollars. La idea de un millón de pesos is modified depending on inflation and changes within the global economy. Even if the artist reaches the representation of a million, what does actually determine the value of this quantity?
Text by Sandra Sánchez (excerpt)
