Layer Room and Mahlerca Gallery
Artists: Erika Bournet Delbosc (FR), Ro-Nalt Schrauwen (NL), Nikki Ward (UK), Kai Holland (DE), Justine Laeufer (DE), Emily Marbach (UK), Pasquale de Sensi (IT), Miriam Martínez Abellán (ES), Liza Petridou (CY), The Scissorhands (DE), Barbara Ribnikar (SI)
The title of the exhibition “ART IN A BOX: Liminal places” refers to a transition zone, the threshold to another space, where one is about to cross, or enter, a new destination or state. It is also a sensation sustained by the three-dimensional object that is located in the box and the space it contains. This exhibition has been conceived to suggest an underlying story that, by guiding viewers through a series of encounters, forces them to doubt their own perception of the spaces they observe. The everyday object functions as a perceptual trap that leads the viewer into a visual paradox, which defies certain laws and attributes of the material world. In the parallel universe of collage and assemblage, the stairs lead nowhere, the proportions of the body vary, creating a new genesis. The forms become abstract and bloom in themselves, passive viewers become active participants through the invitation to understand what has been composed in space.
Assemblage is a technique related to collage, with three-dimensional material. Its possibilities move between the exploration of materials and the search for new expressive forms. It is understood, as in collage, as a principle of thought and action, which connects art and the everyday by developing a strategy of perception of the object in its changing reality. The shadow box, the assemblage in a box, is a hybrid, liminal place where things begin to behave like images, and images have the power of the real. Collage and assemblage share the magical moment when two images collide and create something new in a state of perpetual occurrence and chance.
With the call “Art in a box: liminal spaces”, artists were invited to an exploratory journey into the dimensional, to create scenarios made of textures, original images and found objects, as if on a suspended stage, to tell a little story, the final lines of which will always be written by the imagination of the observer. An assemblage is a cabinet of curiosities where the familiar is transformed into the unknown through the act of placing things in improbable relationships with other objects. Like a kaleidoscope that combines splinters into a new whole, capturing the development in its logic, its natural course and also in its incomprehensible absurdity. This journey through the exhibition is illuminated by words such as abstraction, deconstruction and memory. They are those other conductive threads that constitute the framework where the poetic, the surreal and the fragment and the object interact. The invitation is therefore to embark on a journey of observation and encounter.
- Curator and author of the text: María Elisa Quiaro (VE/DE)