Buenos Aires – Braga Menendez Contemporaneo’s show of Elba Bairon’s sculptures features a large grid of basic black metal shelving displaying about a dozen pieces – mostly white, a few black – arranged as though they were drying in her studio. The shelving is surrounded by three, near-identical, near-life-sized, female figures sitting and holding something in their laps.
To me they appear to be “drying” because Bairon’s pieces look cast-molded from a ceramic or porcelain slip. And on the shelving her works seem like ceramics waiting to be fired, or in-between firings in what’s referred to as a “bisquit” stage (after the first firing but before the application of glaze and the final firing). Bairon’s medium is in fact not ceramic but rather a combination of papier mache and plaster. But their final smooth, matte, molded appearance heightens the sense that her works inhabit a state of constant “becoming”, or similarly, a position in-between states.
The shapes of the pieces themselves sit on the cusp of recognition. From one side, a piece appears amorphous, but from the other, with the addition of a few strokes of crayon-like paint, the piece becomes a human head. Likewise, a head with tree branches sprouting out the back, from another angle, looks like a human heart, arteries and all. The features of the seated female figures are so undefined that they seem equally either in the process of emerging or being eroded away. And the ceramic-ness of the pieces give them an appearance of over-sized figurines causing us to wonder: are these crafts, mass-produced chatchkas, or works of art?
And it is exactly this defiance of definition that breathes a subtle, beautiful life into Bairon’s pieces. Their forms engage our cognition. They invite us to perceive. And as a result, Bairon’s work stimulates an awareness of our perception: of how we form, shape, categorize, and make sense of our world. How, in fact, we make the world as we perceive it.
Nathan Tichenor
No comments:
Post a Comment