Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker. The author of twenty poetry books published in Europe, Latin America and the U.S., she performs and exhibits her work widely. Her book, SPIT TEMPLE (tr. by Rosa Alcalá) from Ugly Duckling Presse, was a runner-up for the PEN Award in Translation in 2013 and has just been reprinted. A precursor of conceptual, impermanent art and the improvisatory oral performance, her work deals with the interactions between language, earth and textiles. She co-edited the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. Since 1980 she divides her time between Chile and New York.
Catalina Bauer (Buenos Aires, b.1976) graduated from the School of Visual Arts at the Finis Terrae University in 1998. Bauer currently lives and works in Santiago, Chile, where besides developing her work she is one of the founders of Taller Bloc (established 2009), an independent art space. Since 1999 she has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, many of these in Santiago and other Chilean cities such as Coyhaique, Concepción, Talca and Valparaíso. She has exhibited abroad in countries including Brazil, Mexico, the US, Australia, Spain, England, and Russia.
MORE INFORMATION about the show:
PROXYCO, Y Gallery, and CCU Art Grant are pleased to present TWO LINES TWINING A SOUL, the first New York City solo show by artist Catalina Bauer. The exhibition is partially a result of her four months residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), in Brooklyn, NY, which was awarded by the CCU Art Grant in Chile.
The show includes different bodies of work, ranging from photography, mural drawing, monotype, animation, and sculpture. The pieces connect formally and symbolically through the reference to the spiral shape, the concentric circle, and the overall notion of the labyrinth.
Bauer’s work process is sometimes meditative, sometimes spontaneous, and at other times visceral. Lapse (Lapso) is a work that the artist has presented on several occasions in Chile and abroad, and one could say that it functions as the starting point, or entry, of this exhibition. The piece consists of a large number of used color-pencils that hang from the wall, with the idea of transforming the body into an instrument much like a compass. The drawing is a performance where the body of the artist – and that of the viewer as well – projects itself onto the wall by the simple gesture made by the accumulation of concentric circles.
During her residency, Bauer explored and navigated New York City and incorporated this experience into her work process. As an outsider she felt that New York bombarded her with an overwhelming amount of information which took time to process and affected and shaped the outcome of her work. Part of this outcome consisted in that her work, the city, and her personal life collided. Bauer invited her twin teenage daughters to participate in an animated piece made from monotypes based on body positions that the two participants took under their mother’s instructions. What was originally a playful gesture – a strategy to involve them and keep them occupied – unfolded into a new way of exploring the same formal and symbolic aspects present in her work. Those that in turn were inspired by the time that Bauer shared with Cecilia Vicuña, the Chilean artist and poet with whom she held stimulating conversations and from where the title of this show originates.
Basket (Cesta), is a series of sculptures made from paper and supermarket coupon catalogs. Observing the waste created by the city, Bauer started collecting outdated catalogs without a specific idea or purpose behind this act. In time she decided to start rolling the paper sheets and weave them. This act became a way to search for an inner self in a context that was completely foreign.
Overall the exhibition contains works that are testimonies of this transitional experience in New York City. To adjust and to adapt to new surroundings implies to be open to experimentation, to try out new mediums and techniques, to observe new things, and to try to understand the ways in which we can intersect our work – and personal lives – with this specific, new, and ever-changing environment.