Skip to main content

Press Release

Press Release

|   Press Release
Press Release | High Voltage, Patricia Van Dalen - artmedia GALLERY - Miami FL 
Electric Blue 6, 2013

Artmedia Gallery is pleased to present High Voltage, an exhibition by Patricia Van Dalen that was conceived specifically for this space.

Van Dalen began her artistic career as a painter in Caracas, Venezuela, during the eighties. After leading a versatile trajectory in which she has made murals for public spaces as well as art installations and other kinds of works, Van Dalen has recently taken up photography again —a medium to which she associated herself during her formative years as a graphic designer— in order to develop the body of work that we are showing today. In the course of this exploration, Van Dalen has found ways to link up with motivating factors from her previous productions, as well as ways to unfold new strategies and artistic configurations that are distinct from those productions.

The show is composed of two installations and two sets or series of photographs that use the line as the main constructive resource and that manifest themselves as mutually interconnected —as if energy circulated intensively between them, according to artist’s choice of words. One of the installations, Wire Garden, comprises a module or grid of thirty-two rectangles with photographic bases; the other, Power Lines, has its supports in six Arches papers that didn’t undergo prior interventions. Both installations have been worked over with plastic lacings —of different colors in each case— that move over the surface of the supporting papers and are fixed by pins placed at varying distances. This operational set-up creates a series of planes interrelated via dynamic lines. In the photographic series, the lines are constituted into referents of the images: in Electric Blue, lines reduced to their minimal, yet simultaneously powerful presence; in Spatial Stations, lines defining the volumes of those power plants which the images register.

From a discursive perspective, then, High Voltage functions as a deconstruction of the relations between history and contemporaneity in the artistic practice of photography, and as an investigation of the tensions between the abstract and the figurative in current-day photography.

About the artist:

Patricia Van Dalen was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela. Currently, she resides and works in Miami. She has been exhibited frequently in Venezuela and has received well-known local awards. She has extensively contributed to mural art and artistic interventions in public spaces as well as private residences. Her work has been collected by institutions such as: Museum of Latin American Art, MoLAA, Los Angeles, CA; Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Coral Gables, FL; Museo de Bellas Artes, Galería de Arte Nacional, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, all of them in Caracas, Venezuela, among others.

About the curator:

José Antonio Navarrete is a critic and curator residing in Miami, FL. As part of an international academic team, he is currently developing an investigation on the subject of Intellectual Networks: Art and Politic in Latin-America, financed by the “Connecting Art Histories” program of the JP Getty Foundation, 2012-2013. He is also curating the exhibition En el lugar de lo dicho. Exploraciones en el archivo discursivo de la fotografía, promoted by the Centro de Fotografía de Montevideo (Uruguay), which will open in November at the country’s Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales.

About the gallery:

Artmedia Gallery was founded in 2012. Located at the Wynwood Art District in Miami, Florida, the gallery’s mission is to exhibit and promote contemporary art. One of the gallery’s central objectives is to explore the vast possibilities of the expanded notion of art thru technography media, with photography and video as the major core of its interest.
Artmedia Gallery’s exhibition program follows rigorous curatorial criteria, providing a space for reflection and critique. The exhibitions include local and around the world artists with a wide range of subjectivities and poetics that enrich the current sensibility.