Artmedia Gallery is proud to host the first solo show of Bárbara Oettinger Searle in the US focuses on her photographic series Blind Spot, made between 2013-2014. This series also centered the Oettinger’s recent personal exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago de Chile, before being included in a group show at Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo in Montevideo.

Interested in researching on interpersonal relationships, the artist conceived this series on the basis of a productive idea that involved more than one hundred persons in its conceptual and visual configuration. She invited people to come to her studio individually, write a personal secret on the material they decided, transform the support of the confidence and destroy it or not with the method they chose. She recorded the last act with her camera, placing the container of the secret on a color cardboard paper used as a background.

The result of the concerted strategy applied by Oettinger is a wide collection of seductive and ambiguous images, all of them full-colored and sumptuous as well as discreet and elusive. In this kind of game played between the artist and the participants in her project, the first one established the general rules and the last ones their particular, different solutions to them. Evidently, we can never know the secrets people wrote, but how they wanted to present the traces of their revelation publicly.

From its birth, the project was placed in the crossing of multiple discourses, such as the practice of collaborative art, the tradition of still life, and the influence of publicity photography in contemporary art. Besides, this series pushes the limits of photography assigning to this medium the task of hiding instead of displaying the "main subject" of each image. We just have the alternative to imagining the way that every picture connects with the experiences of unknown personal interactions through its sequels in human behaviors.  

About the artist:

Bárbara Oettinger Searle is based in Santiago de Chile. She got a Master of Arts degree in 2012. She has presented her work in three personal exhibitions in Santiago de Chile and participated in group shows in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Ukraine, and Uruguay. She uses digital photography, video and installation to show the processes according to which individuals are formed and articulated at different levels of socialization: interpersonal, familial and communitarian.

About the curator:

José Antonio Navarrete has developed an extensive international career as a curator, researcher, and critic of visual arts and culture. His lengthy bibliography focuses on topics of modern and contemporary art, with emphasis on how media technology has affected and transformed art practices. As an artist, he recently presented his first solo exhibition, What images can do, in ArtMedia Gallery.

About the gallery:

Artmedia Gallery was founded in 2012. Located in 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 media technology, with photography and video as its core interest.