Quase exhibition works and views at Galeria Leme, São Paulo 25 Aug - 29 Oct 2018
PRESS RELEASE:
Galeria Leme is pleased to announce its third solo exhibition by the Buenos Aires-based Brazilian artist Jessica Mein. The show features an installation of video-animations, as well as a set of geometric, woven works on hemp.
The exhibition unfolds from a decade-long investigation about the physicality of images and the importance of the supports, surfaces and techniques. Jessica employs obsolete materials found in places where she lived, such as printed hemp spice bags, images of accumulated electricity wires from the city of Dubai, as well as residual billboards from São Paulo and Buenos Aires. The video installation "Quase" [Almost] is comprised of two animations. An image of two coconut trees, captured from a faded tourist advertisement about Brazil in Buenos Aires, naturally loaded with exoticism and melancholic cliché, is interrupted by an Argentinian train as the starting point. The process involves the overlapping of layers, marked with carbon paper, cuts and folds, finalized by scanning, creating a time-space disorder. They have different durations, gaining more and more disparity while being shown in a loop. Never in synch and, therefore, never repeated.
Part of the technique used by the artist is to interrupt the textile of the fabric, reconfiguring it in new delicate and varied geometric patterns. Mein’s process also employs dyeing using the carbon, which transfers colour to the fabric that absorbs the ink throughout its composition, front and back. These processes are complemented by the practice of frottage, allowing the artist to print other shapes and colours by rubbing the carbon and graffiti against the surface, which becomes image. Jessica revisits the practice of the women of her family, embroiders and lace-makers, from the state of Pernambuco. For this exhibition, she brings together her on-going research on de-construction and misalignment, in a dialogue with the methodical, obsessive and anxious gestures.