ALEJANDRA VON HARTZ GALLERYNew openings
Space 1:
SOLEDAD ARIAS / LENORA DE BARROS / SAM WINSTON
Vox
April 13th – June 1st, 2012
Opening Reception for the artists: Friday, April 13th, 2012, from 6 to 9pm
Alejandra von Hartz Gallery is proud and pleased to announce “Vox”, a group exhibition by three prominent artists whose art is both from and of language. Their practices involve all the media varieties of our time, creating meaning through the use or words and texts. Words as image, as beauty, as poetry, as visuals and sounds, as understanding.
SOLEDAD ARIAS: explores the materiality of language, the poetic, visual and phonetic dimensions of a text or a word as a two-and three-dimensional entity in the context of human relations. Arias exposes the intersection of the aural and the visual, one where words, text and involuntary sounds are transformed into a visible, physical form.
In acoustic wall #1, 2011 what appears like voiceless theater notations are more about what is not said rather than what is actually articulated. Yet at the end it is all the same, what we don’t see is just as important as what we perceive.
Soledad Arias will present as well a white neon sign, from her series “phonetic neons”, 2011-2012. In this series Arias distills the excess of language to make apparent an unintentional sound outlining a sonorous pause, an involuntary gap in between words.
LENORA DE BARROS: The first works created by Lenora de Barros can be placed in the field of ‘visual poetry’, a trend that found its development in Brazil, springing from the concrete poetry movement of the decade of 1950. Words and images were her initial materials.
In 1983, LB published the book Onde Se Vê [Where You See], a set of rather uncommon ‘poems’. Some of them dispensed with the use of words, constructed as photographic sequences where the artist herself acted out different characters in performance acts. This book already announced Lenora de Barros’s transit
into the field of visual arts, what eventually came to happen. Since then, the artist has been following her own personal path, marked by the use of diversified languages: video, sound, performance, photography, installation and construction of objects. With a certain Duchampian flair, often employing irony and references to the feminine universe, Lenora de Barros incorporated a series of generational procedures akin to pop, conceptual, and body-art.
In a recent interview to Karina Granieri, Centro de Estudos Brasileños [Brazilian Studies Foundation Center], Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2003, de Barros stated:
“I’ve always been interested in the contact between languages, in generating meanings through the confrontation of different languages, particularly the verbal and visual ones and the acoustic aspect of the words. I experience great pleasure in creating relations between the codes by means of juxtaposition and contamination of one plane into the other – working at the limits, at the borderlines… There is no fixed rule in my creative process determining language priorities or hierarchies. At times, it’s a word, a sentence, a ‘line’
that bursts forth and, from that verbal form I establish the visual and oral expression that I will ascribe to this ‘content’. At others, the process is reversed: visual language imposes itself and the text is conceived after it. Sometimes I create ‘pure’ texts or just photographic images, visual sequences (videos) or just objects, object-poems and/or installations, where the various language forms blend into a dialogue (or in a ‘trialogue’), so as to produce various meanings.”
For the exhibition at Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Lenora de Barros will present “Utopy”, a sound installation from 1996 and “Tempinhos / Tiny Times”, 2008, a video performance. This work was presented recently in the 11th Biennial of Lyon, A Terrible Beauty Is Born, at the Musée d’Art Contemporary, Lyon, France, curated by Victoria Noorthoorn and Thierry Raspail the Artistic Director of the Biennial.
Sam Winston
Solace – from Romeo and Juliet Series
2012
Text set in Adobe Garamond Pro.
Printed Giclée with Pigment Inks on 270gsm Litho-realistic Paper
44.88” x 30.71” (114 x 78cm)
Through his explorations of language SAM WINSTON creates sculpture, drawings and books that question our understanding of words, both as carriers of messages and as information, itself.
In his own words: “Once the word is on the page it cannot be anything but a visual thing. That is a strong theme in my practice – to blur the line between what we call the image and the printed/written word. Similar in a way to how we hear – the spoken word easily being reduced to a noise.”
For the exhibition at Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Winston will present “Solace”, two of the six pieces/ images that compose the renown ”Romeo & Juliet” Series. We are also thrilled to unveil to the public the “l i s t e n” new works.
Soledad Arias: Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Soledad Arias lives and work in New York City, where she received her BFA and MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Soledad Arias has been exhibiting actively both nationally and abroad in galleries and museums. Her work has been shown in numerous institutions including MOMA PS1 (New York), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Jersey City Museum (New Jersey), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York), El Museo del Barrio (New York) among others. Arias’ work is included in private collections in Latin America, Europe, Japan, and the United States. Soledad Arias upcoming exhibits include a solo show opening May 1, 2012 at RH Gallery, New York and a solo presentation of her work at Pulse New York, on view May 3-6. Her work is currently exhibited in Notations: The Cage Effect Today, at Hunter College Art Galleries, New York, curated by Joachim Pissarro.
Lenora de Barros: (1953, São Paulo, SP Brazil) graduated in Linguistics from Universidade de São Paulo / USP and started her artistic career in the 1970s, a time of intense experimentalism in Brazilian art, marked by a strong constructive and avant-gardist bent since the 50s. Those were politically hard years (the country was under military dictatorship) but that were also suffused with the radicalization of esthetic and existential experimentations.Among the recent exhibitions and activities stands out SONOPLASTIA, a sound installation at Millan Gallery, São Paulo-SP, Brazil, November-December 2011, the 11th Biennale de Lyon – Une terrible beauté est née, 2011, where she participated with three works, including the project of the audio-visual installation “Le rencontre entre Echo et Narcisse”, and MERIDIANOS, (dialogues about art program organized by Casa Daros Latinamerica, in partnership with Oi Futuro, Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro-RJ, and which resulted in the production of a film performance in partnership with the Mexican artist Teresa Serrano.Lenora de Barros will participate in the 3rd edition of the Trienal Poli/gráfica de San Juan: Latinoamérica y el Caribe, El Panal/The Hive (Poly/Graphic San Juan Triennial: El Panal/The Hive) set to open in April 2012, under the curatorship of Deborah Cullen Sergio Bessa (Brasil), Úrsula Dávila-Villa (Mexico) and Rebeca Noriega (Puerto Rico). She also participates until 17h june of the show Aire de Lyon at Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Publications: RELIVRO, based on the exhibition REVÍDEO in the cultural center of Oi Futuro in 2010, Rio de Janeiro-RJ where she gathers much of her work from 1975 to 2010. The book is bilingual, English and Portuguese, and includes texts by Augusto de Campos, Tadeu Chiarelli and Alberto Saraiva. COISA EM SI (THING IN ITSELF), interview given to Eduardo Xavier de Souza and published in book form by the Publisher Zouk, Porto Alegre, 2011 (bilingual, English / Portuguese).
She lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.
Sam Winston: He started writing stories and selling artist books through London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and can now be found in many special collections in the UK and the US, including – MOMA, New York; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; The Tate Galleries, London; and Victoria & Albert Museum.
He has exhibited internationally and worked on various commissions including COMME des GARCONS Guerrilla Store (Hong Kong) and The New York Times. His work is currently on show in the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
For more information, please contact the gallery at info@alejandravonhartz.com or call 305.438.0220.