Gravura Brasileira

"Entre o Brilho da Pele e o Esforço do Amor"

Sandra Lapage and Carlos Pileggi

February 7 - March 7 2015

Artist Statement - Carlos Pileggi

My work is a visual reflection on cultural and social phenomena that take place in contemporary life. My concerns contemplate notions of the everyday, the struggle for success, what success means, and what becomes valuable in life. The outcome is charged with humor and criticism.

Omega Replica Watches  

The name Pulga (flea) was coined for publications created in fanzine format. These started as small works, meant to fit in a bag, inside books or in the back pocket of a pair of pants. The flea is also a great jumper, going from one host to another through a simple contact. Likewise, the publications produced have an informal means of distribution, comprising different stages of dissemination of ideas. Nowadays, Pulgas expanded from the fanzine, codex-bound format; they have become albums and interactive installations, and evolve to video, sound and other media. 

The daily bombardment of information leads me to draw profusely,creating a personal archive. I translate this overwhelming amount of information into works that might show an “unfinished”, rugged visual language, that resonates with the aesthetics explored by punk fanzines published in the 1980s. By appropriating this visual language, and the fanzine DIY marginal network, I push my body of work outside the art space. By doing so, I establish tension between traditional notions of artistic work, the aura of the white cube, and my idea of a work of art which can be touched, seen and even brought home.

It is in the now that I find inspiration.

http://cargocollective.com/pulga

Artist Statement - Sandra Lapage

The fundamental meaning of my practice is the impossibility of defining boundaries in contemporary times in terms of language as idiom or artistic media, or in terms of nationality or identity, which remain especially relevant issues for those who migrate for family, work, religious, ethnic or political reasons. 

The practice deals with the construction of heteroclite figures, residues of different personal experiences, represented on one hand by appropriation — which I do not treat as a conceptual practice, but instead as a sort of safe way to work between the environments in which I am a foreigner — and, on the other hand, by a syncretic coexistence of diverse lines of thought and practices with which I build my identity and culture. 

My work deals with blurring boundaries in different levels: between artistic processes, printmaking and sculpture, two-dimensional and sculptural space, destruction and construction, inside and outside, coexisting cultural identities and idioms, and past and present. 

The blurring of boundaries between multiple processes expresses a diverse cultural mindset. In my work I juxtapose Old and New World. I manipulate violently images of European art from medieval times to the Nineteenth century reducing them to constructive elements which are evocative of the Brazilian esthetic of self- built dwellings; these elements are haphazardly arranged and assembled, and the structural precariousness and fragility of the paper are evident to the viewer. The process of destruction and restoration of materials opens the space for potentiality. Destruction becomes construction. My work eludes traditional narrative, with beginning and ending. By working with traces, I am intermingling rational and irrational. For the viewer, the imagery in fragments aims at offering an open-ended and personal experience of the work. 

From traditional artistic practices - printmaking, drawing, sculpture - the blurring of boundaries between processes translates into a contemporary notion of hybridity, be it applied to cultural identity or artistic process. My work deals with the cultural hybridity which is my own: born in Brazil from a Belgian family, I spent my childhood in Belgium and Spain, and adolescent years in Brazil. I have two mother tongues, since Portuguese was the first language I spoke, but French was the language of my schooling. This plural cultural upbringing has an influence in shaping my cultural universe and on my work; I do not feel grounded within the boundaries of a single nation - sometimes unsettling, the feeling of rootlessness is freeing. 

My research revolves around issues of the changing nature of the self in contemporary times, of the turmoil of contemporary life in metropolises, of Brazil’s coloniality, or the idea of past-as-present in former colonies, and of Brazil as an incomplete modernity; the main focus is art as process of self-awareness; sometimes the self transpires into the work - although ontological, it does not portrait the self directly: I am talking about the experience of being an embodied mind. In the work, the sculptural paper skins refer to the dichotomy between private interior and public exterior; these emptied bodies, the result of external pressures, in which the interior has dissolved or vanished, get immersed in their surroundings, in an image of the emptying of the ego. 

As I move into uncharted territories in the making, I am interested in found objects to mold new forms, and also into incorporating actually found objects and heterodox materials in the work. I am interested in the examples provided by arte povera. Conceptually, the work is ever more concerned in letting go of control, increasingly embracing chance and intuition. I am interested in the gap between intention and realization: it is a leap in the work and the path to discoveries. 

www.sandralapage.com

Sandra Lapage - curriculum

Exposições

2014 Open Gate Project: Part 3, 101 Hall Street, NYC http://vimeo.com/114479576 | Evanescence, Gowanus Loft, individual e residência de 10 dias, NYC http://vimeo.com/113878554 | http://vanderbiltrepublic.com/post/102188164530/evanescence | Layers of response, coletiva dos residentes na NARS Foundation, NYC http://narsfoundation.org/exhibition_layResp.php | Curaticism, spoken words exhibition, NARS Foundation, http://narsfoundation.org/exhibition_gam1.php | Dreamcatcher, coletiva na Space Womb Gallery, NYC http://vimeo.com/110532852 | Interference, coletiva de dois artistas na Alumni Room Gallery, Tuohy Hall, Saint Joseph’s College, NYC, curadora Ramona Candy http://vimeo.com/109340052 | Art From the Heart 2014, Gowanus Loft, coletiva organizada pela Vanderbilt Republic, NYC, curadora Katie Peyton http://vimeo.com/109340051 | Drawing Democracies, Steuben Gallery no Pratt Institute, NYC, coletiva organizada pelo Pratt Drawing Club | Drawings along Myrtle, coletiva organizada pelo Pratt Institute, NYC; curadora Jennifer Shepard | Consulado do Brasil em Nova York, coletiva http://tinyurl.com/pyhqykx | Maxxx Project Space, uma individual “em fluxo” durante um mês, Suíça http://cargocollective.com/sandralapage/Maxxx-Project-Space

2013 MFA Thesis Exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine http://tinyurl.com/mwfbjps

http://index.meca.edu/mfa2013/

2012 Programa anual 2012, individual, Centro Cultural São Paulo http://tinyurl.com/ko6uvy8 | MFA Retrospective, Maine College of Art, Portland, ME | SP Estampa, Galeria Gravura Brasileira, São Paulo

2011 MFA Retrospective, Maine College of Art, Portland, ME

2010 Open studios, summer residency, School of Visual Arts, New York 

2009 Amazon suite, individual, A Hebraica, São Paulo | Wildlife Artist of the Year 2009 Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London

2008 Impulso, Emma Thomas Gallery, São Paulo http://emmathomas.com.br/exposicao/impulso/ | Wildlife Artist of the Year 2008 Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London

2007 Amazon suite, individual, Embaixada do Brasil em Bruxelas 

2006 MARP - Programa anual 2006, Ribeirão Preto | Urban Paintings, individual, Cultural Blue Life Art Gallery, São Paulo

Formação acadêmica

2013 Master of Fine Arts in Studio Arts, Maine College of Art, Portland, ME

1999 Arquitetura e urbanismo FAUUSP, Universidade de São Paulo

Residências

2014 Residência de 6 meses na NARS Foundation, Julho/Dezembro 2014, financiada por projeto no Catarse http://catarse.me/pt/sandranars | Villa Ruffieux, Sierre, Switzerland - Janeiro/Março 2014 http://www.chateaumercier-residence.ch

2010 School of Visual Arts Summer Residency, Printmaking and Artist Books, New York

Publicações e prêmios

2014 ovitro.com.br entrevista por Priscilla Nasrallah http://tinyurl.com/n2lh7vl

2013 Blurring boundaries — a process of self-awareness (Lulu Books) http://tinyurl.com/pgr9vdv | Vermont Studio Center Honorable Mention Artist, Robert Sterling Clark Fellowship, http://tinyurl.com/mfqz84r | Artigo: printeresting.org http://tinyurl.com/nkf4f65

2011-2013 Presidential Scholarship no Maine College of Art

Trabalhos em coleções

Villa Ruffieux, Switzerland | Atelier Multiples-Éditions de l’école Cantonale d’Art du Valais, Switzerland http://tinyurl.com/ml5gx33 | Hebraica, São Paulo