until 30th Sept 2015
The Gallery Apart
Via Francesco Negri 43,
00154 Roma, Italy
…a deeper understanding of contemporary reality, where the mind, the body, the self and things are integrally linked, and where the imaginative perception is both mental and physical. This concept is based on the imagination of the viewer, alongside the bodily trace. The works included and the relationship between them, express a view of the contemporary world. There is no distinction between virtual and reality in the way that our self and experiences are constructed and lived.
Ordinary objects which are treated as fossils or artefacts, evoke an earlier and different human presence. These are the places where the sculptures are placed. Hence, Harris’s sculptural work invites the audience to activate the work: the sculptural work through a subtle and gentle performative act. Sculpture-frames and sculpture-objects or evoke body parts, referring to the relationship between reality and virtuality, but also to a hybrid territory where they meet, and where these two terms breakdown. Such as the ubiquitous screen-based devices that represent an extension of the human body or when we place our body on these devices, for example, with our fingers, we involuntarily cover a photographic lens.
The exhibition is spread across the two floors of the gallery . On the ground floor , the works are alternating and prospectively touching in a constant process of framing and unframing. Sculpture-frames standing in the gallery’s space or hanging from the ceiling. The presence or the expression of fragments of shirts or small objects trapped in the concrete Silicon rubber micro-sculptures replicating dozens of ordinary objects we carry everyday pockets and which here are gathered together to form a strip along the wall as if dropped as cultural detritus. Complementing this are sculptures created through three-dimensional prints of actual human organs, gathered by MRI scans that provide parts of the body we can not see but can digitally reproduce. Finally fabric drapes where cyanotype, the most basic sun-reactive photographic solution, captures the a chance contemporary moment through a human process (to length of fabric enough to crumple in the hand to the side at human scale).
The sculptural work in the basement of the gallery is offering different time interaction, inviting and accommodating human engagement and giving place to rest the body. The work welcomes the visitors, encourages them to sit and interact with the book. The book includes a collection of recent writing that Harris has developed in symbiosis with the sculptural work and on occasion of other previous performances. To the artist, in fact, written, is linked with that of sculptural language, where personal perception, imagination, memory and understanding are called upon for a better comprehension of the work.
Photos by Giorgio Benni. Courtesy of The Gallery Apart
