Artist Zura Lagarde comes to Artmedia Gallery with her body of work, The Silent Pulse Beneath Still Stone, which she produced in 2024 and presents for the first time to an audience in this exhibition. The gallery is pleased to showcase a proposal that perfectly vehicles a sophisticated discourse through unexpected and poetic images, a collection of photographs that matches a metaphysical reflection on the becoming of beings and Nature with the pushing of the photographic representation borders.

The camera itinerary followed by Zura—or, better said, constructed by her—has been traced through Nature as the physical world and a concept. Experts define metaphysics as the branch of philosophy that investigates the basic structure of reality and its more general features, that is, the characteristics of existence. Nature, the primary space, the earliest in time or order, has been suitable for Zura to conduct an artistic exploration of this  topic.

She has used the four traditional elements of Nature—Earth, Water, Air, and Fire—as entrances to her visual speculations. She has based the last ones on specific objects and states of matter upon which natural energy and forces act as invoked by her practice. The tools of art, in this case far from the reasoning scientific process, have achieved high possibilities in the hands of the artist in converting the fluid, constantly changing, and transitional things and beings into photographic images: ambiguous, evocative, and something beyond the worldly in their appearance.

From its beginnings, photography has been read commonly as a visible index of reality, as its noticeable trait. However, in this historical course, some photographers have tried to convert the camera into a medium that can record the transient, the ghostly, the unseen. Zura is one of these. Her photographs remind us that the hidden life beneath the stillness of the heavy stone can be perceived with our eyes because it claims to exist in its quiet, prolonged, and extended heartbeat.

About the artist:

Zura Lagarde (born in Mexico City) is a Self-Taught photographer based in Miami. She studied Latin American Painting at Casa Lamm Cultural Center and completed several workshops and courses on photography at Página en Blando School, both in Mexico City. She has participated in group exhibitions in the USA and abroad. The Silent Pulse Beneath Still Stone is her third individual show.

About the curator:

José Antonio Navarrete (Cuban-Venezuelan, based in Miami) is a critic, researcher, and independent art and visual culture curator. He is in charge of the ArtMedia curatorial program and participates in several international projects as a curator or writer contributor.

About the gallery:

Artmedia Gallery was founded in 2012. With a location in Little River, Miami, Florida, the gallery has the mission to exhibit and promote contemporary art based on photography and video practices. One of the gallery’s central objectives is to explore the vast possibilities of the expanded notion of art through media technology.