March 15 - May 19, 2001 at Museo de Arte y Diseno Contemporeano, Costa Rica

Curaduría: Rolando Barahona

“Experiencia gratificante e impactante el contacto con la obra Testigos, donde sobresale el diálogo que se establece con la memoria, el espacio arquitectónico de la sala y el propio espectador. Obras que en su mayoría penden como tapices, hechos en papel blanco tan puro como la luz misma”. Tahituey Ribot. Papel, Silencio y Luz. Suplemento Cultural Áncora, La Nación, Domingo 18 de marzo del 2001.

WITNESSES

How many walls must be traversed in order to move into, adjust, and survive in a changing universe?

THE GARDEN

Nature as we know it is contained within this walled garden. Organic symbols referencing vegetation, animals, and the female body dialogue with each other. By contemplating these symbols one comprehends nature’s immense variety and the parallelism existing between the non-human and human life. But now that nature’s system of interdependence is damaged, we recognize other substance and structures for existence and move on beyond these walls.

PROCESSION

Altered from their former biological forms through multiple transformations - strange reluctant figures walk in procession towards an unknown. They are made visible, touchable, real by the play of light rippling on the intricate detail of their dress. Without bodies their dress carries vestiges of times gone by, references to classical columns, linear tracery of former artistic achievements, an idealized femininity implying virtue and purity - flowers from the planet earth. All is left behind in their empty dresses.

Arrested in motion the figures’ stillness prevails holding a moment in eternal abeyance. Mapping a relationship between presence and absence they exist in a metaphoric calm, composed and detached. Weightless, dangling on tip toes, they hover in a middle ground.

THE EYE WALLS

Witnesses watching and watched - the Mediterranean eye walls are derived from personal as well as an artistic heritage in which the pagan Goddess and the Judeo - Christian laws of God merg. Can consciousness penetrate these cultural walls allowing a clear vision of the changing structure of all living thing?

THE MOON ROOM

The moon wall is a chanting chorus telling of the gradual expiring of the planet earth and the need to connect to the substance and energy of the stars. The pathos of loss as well as the light of hope haunts this site. A former world and self is ending but another is being gained. That which is known disappears but fragments of the earth’s experiences are sprinkled in an expanded universe.