Artist: Marina Pinsky
Exhibition title: Base of a column
Venue: Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico City
Date: March 1 – April 22, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Parallel Oaxaca
Marina Pinsky’s works examine the contours of our saturated visual culture and suggest perspectival plots within historical events as platforms for imagination. Transposing hypotheticals into spatial and temporal planes conceptually expanded, the relationship between object and image in her work materializes as an individual experience, where interpretation evades linearity using free association to concur how an image can speak.
Pinsky’s work present layered narratives where each subject she takes becomes a research project, departing from an observational method her practice operates on how historical and ideological notions can permeate formal qualities in the process of image making.
Pinsky draws inspiration from culturally entrenched imagery she encounters, each subject she chooses merge between virtual and physical worlds transposing it to other means.
In “Base of a column” at Parallel /// Oaxaca, Pinsky presents a new body of works where an image of an indefinable and a-temporal architectural space is translated from photography to an abstract image. Transposing a fragment of a ruin to a textile construction, the different textures and layers juxtaposed as a recently unified image combine a strong spatial ambiguity of depth and protrusion. From a visit to the columned courtyard at the house of the aztec Knights Eagle at Templo Mayor, Mexico City, the impossibility of a linear narrative is assessed from a fragmented column transformed to an abstraction. The repetitive pattern amplified by the color variation of an embroidered image paradoxes the material interpretation and archaeological mise-en-abyme to reject the expectations of narrative cohesion based on understanding from the material.
The second series presented at the exhibition are low temperature ceramics made by the artist in Atzompa, Oaxaca at the Coatlicue Martinez Alarzón workshop, it replicates the interest in vernacular architecture and the working method between the imagery and structure of historical scenarios, which hover between socio-historic and natural signifiers from the past and present.
Marina Pinsky (Moscow, 1986). She studied at the University of California, Los Angeles and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The artist currently lives and works in Brussels and Berlin. Her recent exhibitions include shows at 303 Gallery, NYC; De Vleeshal, Middelburg, Netherlands; C-L-E-A-R-I-N-G, Brussels; WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Kunstverein, Düsseldorf; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; 13th Biennale de Lyon; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. The artist is represented by C-L-E-A-R-I-N-G, Brussels/ NYC and 303 Gallery NYC.
