Natalia Villanueva Linares: Lands of Dual 11
@ Heaven Gallery
1550 N Milwaukee Ave #2, Chicago, IL 60622
Opening Friday, May 3rd, from 7PM - 11PM
On view through Sunday, June 2nd
“This work indexes a process of intensive interaction with a quotidian material: tissue paper, a secondary accessory, usually accompanying gifts, and discarded after a single use. In an accumulative and repetitive procession, Villanueva Linares massages an enduring softness into this material, activating its fibers and making it function as a stable fabric for asserting the monumental. This generous transmogrification of such a simple substance collapses time into the material and probes its potential for storing memory.
Natalia’s shape shifting gesture brings to bear the writer Saidiya Hartman’s definition of beauty in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: “Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.”
Each rectangular minutia of this installation exists in variations of blue, as well as its spectral derivations violet, turquoise, etc. I am forced to think about the musical tradition of the blues in response to this work; they are both concerned with stretching and transforming benign stories and everyday matter into expressions of capaciousness while standing outside standard units like time and looking for new intuitive and adjustable metrics. […]
The artist, alongside seven co-performers, dipped bricks of tissue paper into a pool of water in a repetitive ritual procession, pulling dye from the material, canning the dye, and remoulding the wet tissue paper into small, compressed bricks. The resultant jars of dye and compressed bricks are displayed on a wooden shelf […]. This new work demonstrates the abundant potential of the everyday, characterizing ways simple actions can exert multidimensional transformations.”
By Chukwudubem Ukaigwe
Extract of text To Broadcast is to Scatter
at the School of Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Canada 2024
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Tags: Chicago, Heaven Gallery, Lands of Dual 11, Natalia Villanueva Linares, West Town
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