Sophie WHETTNALL
Ignacio PEREZ-JOFRE
Gabriel DIAZ
The Journey. New Peregrinations
At Museum das Peregrinacions
and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea
The ritual ceremonies of many contemporary artistic practices, often consisting of pilgrimages similar to those of our ancestors, involve a very particular recreation of the world.
The objective of this exhibition is not to look at the act of pilgrimage from a religious point of view so much as an anthropological and –derived from that dimension- an artistic one. Some creative contemporary practices have to do with paths and trajectories, after flâneur and land art instituted a new, direct, experiential way of relating to our surroundings, through the discipline that walking involves. The povera, the conceptual, the situational shifts –to cite a few later examples- did not do more than amplify a line of work related to very old activities within the history of humanity.
The exhibition The Journey. New Peregrinations try to map, experience, and recreate the world from the point of view of the mythical, where the mythical tours that are traced in these works and initiatives are represented in paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, and photographs. In modern, contemporary language, they represent the idea of pilgrimage present in different mythologies. Walking is seen as a ritual and as art: a representation of an experience of mythical reality and an intervention in reality by the hand of artists like Sophie Whettnall, Ignacio Pérez-Jofre, and Gabriel Diaz, who will create works specifically for the display.
Each one of the pieces selected or produced for this exhibition will question reality from the perspective of the discipline, reflect on nature and experience, and show paths of communion and fusion with surroundings. They also involve a meeting with different landscapes in which something lay dormant which may soon be awoken. Just as there is something dormant in each of the artists that present themselves before the tasks that each one of the works present in the exhibition requires, because there is something in each of them that may be awoken. At the intersection of these two potentials, the landscape and the being in each of the artists, is where that symbolic space shown in this exhibition is produced.
The three participating artists assume the maximum of contemporary man, abandoning the illusion of the transcendental, but at the same time trapped in a permanent longing and desire for the great beyond that always calls to them, reviving old pilgrimage paths. In addition to their own productions for the exhibition, their paths cross in their visions of others’ works. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication with texts by curator Marina Toba, CGAC director Manuel Olveira, and Museo das Peregrinacions director Bieito Pérez, in addition to an analysis of the work of Gabriel Diaz by Chus Martínez Domínguez, of Sophie Whettnall’s work by Anna Cestelli, and of Ignacio Pérez-Jofre by Javier Pérez Bujan.
Sophie Whettnall, Ignacio Perez-Jofre, Gabriel Diaz
The Journey. New Peregrinations
July 12 - August 26, 2007
Exhibition locations:
Museum das Peregrinacions and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea
Galician Center for Contemporary Art and Museum of Peregrinations
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