Friday, March 24, 2017

Ground Control



Through ceramic sculptures, videos and photographs, the artist outlines a discontinuous narration,starting from her own body and linked to space exploration. Precisely, the works of the exhibition revolve around the relationship of the artist’s body with her work materials, essentially the ceramics. Through the performative link and the double meaning between subject and material, between structure and mass, Teresa Solar reflects on concepts such as control, resistance, a definitely precarious balance of sense and accident.

The title of the exhibition, Ground Control, has a double meaning. On one hand it is a direct reference to the material, ground or clay, and the pressure exerted on it when working on the potter’s wheel. The body of the artist fights against the resistance that the material offers to control it and, in turn, this effort makes it become matter. On the other hand, on a large scale, it has a reading related to the space race: the ground control monitors the takeoff of a rocket into space.

The idea of tense balance between oneself and the world is present in the videos of the exhibition. In Being a person you did not know you were, we see a puppet that adopts the role of the divided adult, of the unknown who is born in us, who turns us in foreigners inside our body and invalidates the certainty of the outside world. Continuing with the idea of the divided subject, in the video Ground control, the artist is transformed into the clay ball that turns on the potter’s wheel. The image of the turning body is accompanied with fragmented stories that connect the accident of the space shuttle Columbia, exploding into pieces due to a failure in its protective skin, with the injuries suffered by the artist herself.

This double relationship is also present in the sculptures. The pressure of the metal bars alludes to the process of creation, remembering, in turn, the pile of rubble of an accident, in which the ceramic becomes the body of the subject. Ceramics allow us to emphasize the contrast between the primitivism of a material and a technique as old as humanity, with the technological sophistication of the ceramic skins that cover the rockets.

Teresa Solar Abboud
Ground Control
24/03/2017 – 03/06/2017