Realspace
Kimberly Gattozzi
Exhibition runs from November 4th - November 18th
Reception for the Artist November 4th from 4pm - 6pm
In conjunction with LINK exhibition
The works of Realspace are end products of studying Virginia Woolf’s 1925 circadian novel Mrs Dalloway and exploring technologies, using both analog and digital tools and a conceptual process of deconstruction to return to work initially done by the hand. Pieces have been selected from a body of work that includes blind contour drawings of plants mentioned in Mrs Dalloway; mixed media works on paper; photograms; ‘printouts’ on wood and plastic; paintings on grommeted, unprimed, and unstretched canvas tarps/banners; and a 24-hour-long ‘soundtrack’/radio show HearSeeThink. The works of Realspace seek balance between cyberspace and realspace—mechanistic and digital processes and the hand—while opening up a dialogue about time, tools, reality, and observation.
Time is persistent in Woolf’s London-based novel, which is marked by recurring references to the chimes of Big Ben and St. Margaret’s; art making is time-consuming. In Mrs Dalloway Woolf reminds us that we all are prisoners of time, “solitary traveller[s]” (85–8) of consciousness who feel, think, love, remember, work, strive, suffer, give, take, age, do, and die—and who affect one another in unexpected (and unknown) ways. Metaphorically the physical activity of making and the deconstructive practice of information refer to shadows, which represent the passage of time, the movement of the Earth around the sun, things seen but not seen, and Plato’s Cave—the habit of looking at representations rather than actual things themselves.
Realspace addresses looking, listening, and thinking; absence and presence; illusion and reality; directed action and balance; and reductiveness and the flatness of perception that characterize the post-historical, post-industrial digital era.
Work Cited: Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. Print.