Join us on Saturday, July 13th at 6 pm for the Land of Dual 11 performance by Natalia Villanueva. In this performance 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 remolding 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.

“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

Natalia Villanueva Linares is a French Peruvian maker, graduated with highest honors from Beaux Arts, the National School of Fine Arts of Paris. She currently lives in Chicago and works between North + South America and Europe.

Natalia speaks in amounts and believes in poetry made from excessive quantities, in simple objects radiating with power over her everything. There is in the work a notion of continuity which communicates between the immense and the minute. She transmutes found, worn, old objects or those found in the banal of everyday life. The concept of sensitive mathematics animates a large part of her work, either through the abundance of large quantities of gestures and objects, or in its relationship to space and temporality. She has a magnetic affection for large collections of objects charged with history. With an animistic relation to certain materials, she invites others to feel the magnitude of their generosity.

Her work has been shown in two major exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Paris. She exhibited at the Sala Miro Quesada Garland in Peru (2013), Collège de Bernardins in Paris and La Graineterie (2018). Natalia had her first solo shows with Doyang Lee Gallery (2014, France) DPM gallery (2019, Ecuador), Wu Gallery (2021, Peru), Comfort Station in Chicago (2022). Her solo show at the Museo de Arte de San Marcos (2022, Peru) won the Luces Award for best solo exhibition of the year. In 2023 she exhibited at DePaul Art Museum, Hyde Park Art Center, the Franklin (Chicago IL),  El Lobi (Puerto Rico) and the School of the Art Gallery (Canada).

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Tags: Chicago, Heaven Gallery, Lands of Dual 11, Lands of Dual 11: Performance, Natalia Villanueva Linares, West Town