...in anticipation, let me share the 'official' release on this new unveiling. It offers some insight into my themes and process. Hope it's of some interest!
Introducing
Visual Poet Carola Perla
Miami Author Highlights Transience and Transculturation
in Illuminated Paper
Sculptures
ATELIER 1022 Studio and
Fine Art Gallery introduces resident ‘paper sculptor and visual linguist’, artist
Carola Perla, whose latest visual poetry installation "Se Vende" is
set to be unveiled at ATELIER 1022's 2nd Anniversary Exhibit - "Perla
Projekt 2.0" - on May 11th, 2013.
The young German-Peruvian author launched her literary fiction novel
"Gibbin House" at the opening of ATELIER 1022 in May 2011, and has in
the ensuing two years expanded on her published prose with an impressive
collection of floor-to-ceiling visual poetry 'illuminations' that explore
transience, permanence, and transculturation through cut paper, light, graphite
drawings, and autobiographical source material.
Carola Perla's soon-to-be unveiled "Se Vende" integrates
all these elements and introduces as its autobiographical component the
real-life demolition of Casa Marsano, an ancestral estate and Lima
landmark. A graphite representation of
this site emerges from behind a carved wall-sized 'chant' poem that uses the
Spanish 'For Sale' expression (Se Vende)
as its central 'word motif'. In "Se
Vende", the poem invokes Limean history and folk references, their
melancholy devaluation mirrored by the ever-crumbling letters and the building's
spectral silhouette which hovers amid fine incisions. Back lighting and the artist's recorded voice
performance of the poem add multi-sensory resonance.
The artist has dubbed her poems 'chants' because they evolve from
a word or phrase on which she must meditate during the process of cutting each
letter freehand. The perpetual
incantation organically inspires the sound or image of the next, the motif functioning
as both a visual and musical building block that slowly draws in other
elements. Since such poems depend on the
immediacy of the physical creation, they are composed entirely in the moment. Each piece, despite its graphic precision, is
therefore an absolute and spontaneous original.
"I
see my paper installations as room-sized conversations - visual echoes of my
personal fascination with displacement and the way language shapes identity,
having spent much of my early childhood traveling across borders, from Romania
to Peru to Germany to Miami all before the age of ten," explains the
artist.
"The
search for 'home' and 'voice' is what drives both my personal and aesthetic
decisions. It led me to write about
exile in Gibbin House and to create a
mute protagonist. However, living in
Miami, which is this very transient, multi-lingual city, is a daily reminder
that the struggle for 'home' and 'voice' is not my own, but universal. My hope is that the visual impact of these
sculptures, coupled with the familiarity of at least one of the languages I use
in my poems extends that same reaffirmation to others."
In
addition to her poetry chants, Carola features in her pieces excerpts from her
novel Gibbin House, as in "Off
the Page", the first of the artist's cut-paper sculptures born out of her
wish to transcend the inherently hermetic nature of the writing process. The installation, which debuted during Art
Basel Miami 2011 to public acclaim, was comprised of the material culture
amassed over a nine-year writing odyssey, and punctuated by the last page of
the book - a cascading blanket of white paper, carved delicately with letters
dangling off the page. Imbued
with movement and aglow with diffused light, these floating letters translated
the extemporaneous vibrancy of language and became for the artist an ethereal
manifestation of the spoken word.
"The ephemeral quality of paper adds to the effect with its
frailty," says Carola, "yet the irreversible act of cutting
reinforces the permanent nature of words.
As words cannot be unsaid, so a paper cut is the ultimate in commitment. The possibilities seemed endless."
Indeed, the potential
for this art form sparked the series of transience- and transculturation-themed
works that round out the collection currently on display at ATELIER 1022:
"Spelling Bee", a whimsical floor-to-ceiling visual poem in four
languages that traces a young girl's linguistic journey across continents; the
German-language "Illegible", incorporating a graphite portrait and
the original poetry 'chant' that addresses identity through language; as well
as the small-scale "A-Mended Conversation" cut from Mexican amate
bark and embroidered with printed text from the Gibbin House manuscript, the
medium's traditional uses highlighting gender and class roles as defined by the
novel's fictional characters.
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