Exhibition of new works by Helen Blejerman, Lisa Murphy and Hondartza Fraga. Curated by Hondartza Fraga. COLAR…TE ….. GALLERY
FROM ONE DISTANCE… TO ANOTHER
(Exhibition text by Hondartza Fraga)
It takes about 8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth. There are around 693 miles from Sheffield to Santander. There is an average distance of roughly 65 millimetres between the eye’s pupils. Finite distances. Physical, temporal and cultural distances have given place and shape to this exhibition in one way or another. But there are other distances being materialised here. Uncertain distances that escape measurement and definition.
There is an infinite wandering between the traveller and the memory of the journey. There is an infinite space between looking and the construction of the eye. There are infinite shadows between the souvenir and its emotional value. Infinite distances. The bridges between the drawing and its construction are somewhere in these ambiguous distances and the tensions between looking, reading and questioning the distance between the representation and its context. Drawing is the device that recovers reality as illusion and transforms matter into image, image into memory, memory into matter.
A map is an abstract translation of a physical space that suggests its navigation. But a drawn map of an imaginary place is a guide to an impossible navigation, only achievable through vision and fantasy. A journey that goes to where it never arrives, and comes from where it never parted; that inhabits the drawing better than any other place precisely because it cannot inhabit it.
A drawing of the eye anatomy describes something inaccessible to the naked eye; it is an artificial construct that helps to understand something real. But sometimes, looking only intensifies doubts and uncertainty around what is represented. Like an illegible text about the workings of the eye that marks the distance between seeing and recognising. The representation refers no more to its original but to the space between language and the message.
A model ship at the same time evokes and denies the idea of journey. A souvenir is a fragmented residue from a faint and ephemeral time and place. The shadow of the model is like a memory without its past experience or a silhouette without its owner: only a fabricated absence, a distorted image half way in the distance between memory and fiction.
Helen Blejerman is an artist born in the Mexico City, her practise has been based in the last years in the subjects of otherness and foreignness, in the idea of belonging and no belonging at the same time. Helen tries to explore in her work the bizarre space that surrounds the status of the foreigner.
Lisa Murphy is an Irish artist who lives in Sheffield but longs for somewhere inbetween. In her work, she attempts to convey her anxiety about things that she does not understand. This endeavour has led her to reflect how she views objective portrayals of knowledge and will bring her further illumination around the technical mechanisms of the social. Hopefully.
Hondartza Fraga, born in Galicia, uses her work to explore the relation of dependency between images, objects (some found, some remote) and the individual. Fascinated by different image-making processes, the space suggested by our assumptions of what is real or fictional and the physical and emotional distances between the too small and the too big.