Artist: Esther Gatón
Exhibition title: Emil Lime
Curated by: Cory John Scozzari
Venue: CA2M Centro de Arte dos de Mayo, Madrid, Spain
Date: February 18 – May 21, 2023
Photography: Roberto Ruiz / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist, CA2M Centro de Arte dos de Mayo and the respective copyright holders
Emil Lime is an exhibition by Esther Gatón, curated by Cory John Scozzari revolving around a large-scale mechanized sculpture. The project sets in motion forms, techniques and conceptual interests frequent in Gatón’s practice, such as the construction of ambiguous environments, amateur science, visual artifice, and the crossovers between femininity and machinery, articulating them here, together in a single installation.
Hovering in the middle of the exhibition space is the show’s central protagonist, a sculpture that seems to move of its own accord as if possessed. It is suspended by four steel cables connecting it to a central motor programmed by an Arduino (an open-source platform used for programming electronics) that controls its movement. The work’s ramshackle construction was additive, in that Gatón gathered and attached a wide range of disparate materials to the structure’s central aluminum frame. The piece —also titled Emil Lime — has been elongated with various width pieces of black java bamboo, held together with copper and aluminum wire and extra strength tape, and adorned with LED lights, high-gloss enamel paint, a plastic rubber snake, a paper bird, facial jewelry, an anchor sticker, and ash. Suspended between and integrated into the pieces of bamboo is a vegan bioplastic, a staple material in Gatón’s practice as of late. Here it has been poured onto pieces of multicolored silk, and hand-burned and dyed with turmeric, paprika, biodegradable glitter, seaweed, charcoal, cocoa, food coloring, eggshells, orange peels, garlic, sparkling soap, curry powder, maca, and ink.
One of the original impetus for the exhibition is the regional fair, and parallels can be drawn between the sculpture on display and a variety of attractions, particularly the mechanical bull and pirate ship. The former has its origins in the rodeo, where a single rider mounts a mechanized bull whose movements replicate the animal’s bucking. Riders are meant to hold on until they are eventually thrown off. The latter is an open-air gondola ride which moves a group of passengers back and forth from a central pendulum. The oscillation of these attractions is mirrored in the exhibition’s palindromic title Emil Lime, whose spelling is the same both forwards and backwards. Gatón’s interest in popular spectacles relates to an attraction to instability, fear, and adrenaline, and the ways in which these emotions manifest themselves both in the visitor’s body and in society at large.
For Gatón, this reckless spirit of dizzied excess parallels Spain’s economic history in the early 2000s, with the neoliberalization of the economy, the construction boom and the political value ascribed to consumption and accumulation. This trajectory was cut short by the crash in 2008, the critical year when the CA2M Museum itself was constructed. Emil Lime harkens to a moment just before the breakdown of perhaps ill-founded hopes, expectations and projections. The sculpture replicates a nostalgic and fevered delirium through its seemingly erratic choreography of dips, swings, drops and rattles.
