Aguariacuar The Departure 1993
Aguariacuar The Departure 1993
Aguariacuar The Departure 1993
Aguariacuar The Departure 1993
Aguariacuar The Departure 1993
Aguariacuar The Departure 1993
Aguariacuar The Departure 1993
Aguariacuar The Departure 1993
Aguariacuar: The Departure
Book of 10 prints
Edition: 54 in Arabic numbers, 9 in Roman numbers, 3 Hors Commerce
Prologue by Juan Pedro Posanni
Poem by Edda Armas
3 folding sheets
7 separate papers
Texts: Silk –Screen
Images: Photo-etching, aquatint, lithography and silk-screen
Sheets: 40 x 120 cm
Papers: 40 x 60 cm (3); 40 x 30 cm (4)
“… Monumental structures are also present in the series of etchings in the book, an album of prints, perhaps also a sculptural object, titled Aguariacuar: The Departure. Here too, the series sets out from an act of photographing: wandering and patient search for the right angle, at a desolate site in Venezuela. The place is called San Lorenzo de Aguariacuar, after the church, the construction of which was never completed, on land that was once an Indian village. “These are places that belong to this side of the world”, the artist writes me from there. A place inhabited by forsaken people, desolate like brambles, on a side road that no one ever travels”. The ruins of the abandoned church, as capture by her camera, serve here as the base for a rich painterly treatment, by means of engraving and etching, which blurs the details and intensifies the sense of desolation, the ghost-like character of the place. The gray monochrome covers the abandoned building; the way the dust covered Pompeii, and establishes the meaning of the entire series as a metaphor of lost time.
The book includes three pages that fold out (like a fan or an accordion), on each of which there appears one large etching and two small ones. The large images on each of the pages change, and of the two small ones, only one changes each time (the Domino principal again). This creates the concatenation, one thing born from another and leaving its traces in it. In the foldout pages, there are kinds of windows that are open, cuttings that make different readings of the work possible. The book also contains all the seven etching separately, without cuttings. This makes it possible to read the visual text of the book both in its complete and in its partial and decomposed form, with each etching revealing itself gradually. This principle connects once more to a photographic / cinematic thinking based on a multiplicity of possibilities of points-of-view – a quality that is embodied in the camera. In terms of values, this multiplicity of possibilities is analogous to the way the photographer contemplates his object. “He apprehends the importance implicit in the actualization of a many points and refuses to adhere to one point-of-view. In these choices, the photographer is guided by doubt with regard to how he perceives the world, and consequently the act of photographing is anti-ideological, in the sense that ideology is a preference of one point-of-view over another”. This idea of multiple possibilities is also embodied in the symbolic meaning of the book as a kind of cultural memory, as an object that accumulates acquired information …”
Tami Katz-Freiman |