Raid: Maria Elisa D’Andrea – Greig Burgoyne Curated by Camilla Boemio

About

Raid is a research project started last year with AAC Platform curated by Camilla Boemio, related to textile arts and participatory practices. Raid documents the practice of the artists Maria Elisa D’Andrea and Greig Burgoyne.

The exhibition presents itself as a mirror which reflects the subtleties of the language of art; in a timeless reference in which the installation and the video/performance allow experimental thinking perspectives. In recent times we feel as if we were living in a Bertolt Brecht play or a Jean-Paul Sartre book; or in Berger’s prose: materiality, corporeality, and the movement of thought intertwine and disperse as a series of vying intensities. As Berger puts it: “language is a body, a living creature". This analogy with a state of mind, and the use of the body, can encourage dialogue between two different kinds of art mediums.

Maria Elisa D’Andrea presents for the show the site-specific installations: She and Cieloterra-Terracielo. The form, the narrative, and the meaning are traced in her work through the various states of formal and allegorical existence. Each drawing or painting on paper, like her textiles artworks, is the result of highly virtuosic techniques that often require extended periods of time (and patience) to execute. The works arise from personal experiences, visions, and sensations that lead to iconic images and embodied reflections on feminist symbology; each is like an amulet charged with devotional fervor.

Greig Burgoyne engages in a broad-based site-specific spatial practice that embraces film, live performance, installation, sound, and text. Taking anomalies of the space, he seeks to test or expand alternative body/site relations with regard to space and thinking.

The Prison Drawing, his well-known film, was shot in the limited space of a cell. It takes the notion of drawing as an act of covering and form of measurement, in an immersive act of attempted liberation. The film chronicles what could be seen as a bad day spent wallpapering a space, with no assistants, paste, or ladders, just out of a desire to cover and negate the cell. Stopping only when exhausted, Burgoyne offers the viewer a spectacle of endurance undaunted by a failure and doomed from the start. In his attempts to be free of the cell, he is potentially submerged by the paper as a result. The outcome is a film projected across the cell walls that unites the tension between the restricted, solid space with the fluidity and potential of the performative act. Consequently, the solidity and stability of the prison cell are questioned and liberation maybe indeed be possible.

Reservation: The gallery is open timed reservations are available. If you are making timed reservations, please make a separate reservation for each person in your party. You can send an e-mail to aocf58@virgilio.it