VEIL
What things come into play when we ascribe meaning to an experience? The meaning we ascribe depends, in general, on the habits that are revealed to us in the process of generating meaning. The action of constructing meaning is intrinsic to experience. But language is not complete.
Ivelisse Jiménez
VEIL presents recent work by Rebecca Adorno, Javier Bosques, Ivelisse Jiménez, Natalia Martínez, Danny Rivera Cruz, Guillermo Rodríguez and Chaveli Sifre. Alluding to Chicago's Apartment Gallery culture while responding to Produce Model’s architecture and material history as a former laundromat, the show draws on familiar as well as abstract associations of domestic space, re-veiling it as a place of mystery and wonder. VEIL is the result of an expanded conversation between the artists that started with the recently opened exhibition Balancing a blade on diamond grass (Balancing a diamond on a Blade of Grass) at El Lobi, a former hotel Lobby in Santurce, Puerto Rico. As in Balancing… the works on VEIL tend to blur the lines between mental and material environments employing ordinary objects as poetic devices.
Proposing a meteorological conception of landscape, a doppler radar color legend becomes an infographic ‘stained glass’ in Guillermo Rodriguez’s gallery window intervention radiating light and color into the works on display while questioning the taxonomic process of meaning ascription –is it possible to somatize an algorithm; to taxonomize a sensation? (...) Moving away from the inherently futile gesture of naming and labeling in order to code and decode our experience of the real, we encounter Ivelisse Jimenez’s multilayered series “Intervalos, confines y territorios.” Fluctuating between experiential and cognitive processes, Jimenez’s work compels us to “gain in consciousness” by adopting a heightened state of perception as a guiding principle to navigate the show.
Danny Rivera Cruz presents a modular structure made of ornamental glass blocks as the result of a sustained object-aided investigation. The sculptural scale and quality of this liminal structure suggest a space of transit, a domestic portal that merges public and private space. Blurring the threshold that separates home from the outside world, Natalia Martínez presents the results of an unusual artistic collaboration: a series of bird nests made in "collaboration" with a family of warblers that nest in her living room. The notion of a certain “household animism” runs throughout the show offering new ways of seeing and interpreting the space of dwelling as a subtle interior landscape; a secret garden of sorts.
Synthesizing landscape in unusual ways, Rebecca Adorno explores the magnetic qualities of metal particles found in black sand collected in the coast of Viequez, P.R., introducing geological time and layers to the show. In Untitled (Desagüe) the constant sound of flowing water resonates through the gallery’s drainpipes harmonizing the acoustic space with rainy sounds from the outside. Chaveli Sifre infuses the show with "domestic scented" perfumes made by the artist that hover around the space encapsulated in soap bubbles. Nuancing the space between the objects on display, the sonorous and olfactory interventions by Adorno and Sifre accentuate the harmony and peculiarity of Produce Model architecture. By focusing on the structural features and particularities of the gallery space, the flows, fibers and fragrances that permeate the show reveal and accentuate the poetic potential that lies in relegated and marginal corners. Creating a moiré effect with window screens, Javier Bosques projects a veiled seascape, generating a perceptual distraction between medium and message. In VEIL landscape is simultaneously perceived and conceived as an act of the imagination. As in the exhibition that preceded it, VEIL presents objects and banal situations that under patient contemplation reveal their potential to marvel, their charm and poetry.