ART CITIES:Venice-The Hidden Dimension Chapter II
Throughout his career the American anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher Edward T. Hall, introduced a number of new concepts, including proxemics, polychronic and monochronic time, and high and low context culture. In his second book, “The Hidden Dimension“ (1963), he describes the culturally specific temporal and spatial dimensions that surround each of us, such as the physical distances people maintain in different contexts.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marignana Arte Gallery Archive
The second chapter of the exhibition “The Hidden Dimension” is on show at Marignana Arte Gallery in Venice. This two-stage exhibition project is based on Edward T. Hall’s book. The book sets out to explain how we are influenced and influence our own lives on the basis of how distant we are from one another: from what is known, from what we love and respect, but also from what we do not know, do not comprehend, what we fear, perhaps because it is far from us physically and therefore also sensitively and emotionally. For the second part the Curator Ilaria Bignotti invited: Arthur Duff, Maurizio Donzelli, Aldo Grazzi, Paola Anziché, Sophie Ko and Verónica Vazquez. Arisen from residences on several continents, from Azerbaijan to Columbia, Paola Anziché’s works are families of sculptures in jute, large textiles that become performing garments allowing to experiment with chromatic light, small and big sculptures made with antique yarns from hemp to mohair wool. In the recent exhibition “Threads & Making” at the Turner Contemporary when she was invited Paola Anziché created an extensive installation, exhibiting 38 elements belonging to the same family as those shown at Marignana Arte. Shortly before at the Milan Triennial for the exhibition “W. Women in Italian Design” at Design Museum,7she was invited to show other works, formerly made with textile materials and introducingnatural organic elements. Proxemics for Sophie Ko means work method, creative process, and visual verification: the pure pigment densifies, squashes, slides, and even moves through tiny ducts inside the container the artist created, this protective house to prevent its dispersion or transformation into another state. Sophie Ko’s work requires different distances. From close up we discern its dispositive grammar: densifications, rarefactions, small falls, teeming whirls, and tiny chromatic rhythms that pure pigment creates and undoes each time, in a dramatic declaration of its fragile and everlasting mutability. From afar the eye grasps the entire landscape that is outlined, a map of heights and paths that penetrate one another, beyond the translucent limit of the surface. All of Maurizio Donzelli’s work arises from a corps-à-corps between his boundless and prehensile imaginary, able to range through cultures, language, iconographies, millenary visual alphabets, and his working method, that can juxtapose, on the anatomical table, intuition with chance, possibility with method. This subtle borderline, the potential of the image as an undefined fragment, rigorous and conclusive, something composite and polysemous, is the object of Aldo Grazzi’s questioning. For Grazzi distances cannot be classified, there is no single solution, nor possible mensuration. Everything shifts, agitates, perturbs in the metaphysical condition that is ours, still today. Arthur Duff expresses the dignity of the artist who is able to tell the distances and anxieties of the man of his time, he does it with a stubborn coherency, even in the constant experiments with materials, assembled, confronted, arranged to create alphabets of a temporary or very ancient law, undecipherable or polysemic messages, solid laws on panels tested by fire and wind, words marked by light that contracts and expands on variable rhythms. Veronica Vásquez chooses looms from old weaving mills, crumpled paper patterns, papers, and letters of a remote correspondence; she folds old iron, knots grids, sews and unthreads words and signs. Paper, iron, red thread are the three tools that sustain and coagulate one with the other, forming stories steeped in memories and trials, ardors and excesses. Faced with her work we have our back to the wall, we have to stop, take a deep breath, and look a second time, maybe a bit violated – finally violated – by the turbulences of the materials that become metaphors of sentiment.
Info: Curator: Ilaria Bignotti, Marignana Arte Gallery, Dorsoduro 14, Rio Terà dei Catecumeni, corner with calle Lanza near Chiesa della Salute, Venice, Duration: 10/5-9/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue & Wed 14:00-18:30, Thu-Fri & Sat 11:00-13:30 & 14:00-18:30, www.marignanaarte.it
