Skip to main content

Artist Statement

Statement

|   Statement
Statement | High Voltage - Patricia Van Dalen - artmedia GALLERY - Miami FL - 305
Spatial Station 1, 2013

We all need another place. What I call another place is that alternate, illusory location, to which we only arrive through one of memory’s shortcuts. My other place is not necessarily a home, a place that provides contention and shelter, but a territory I need to rediscover every time I begin a new body of work.

The other place that I decipher, that I interpret for this exposition, is built from within the attraction that grids exert on me. They fascinate me. Our sight is capable of creating them, hovering over the electrical power stations: nets woven instantly as a consequence of the perspective our gaze imposes on the cables and metallic structures, the dispensers of high voltage. These are strange and inaccessible places, raised on an intriguing scale. Their presence is foreign, so to speak –even if it is well incorporated into our day-to-day perception. Unless, of course, we start reading them aesthetically, which is one of the ways I take to approach this matter. These mysterious industrial sites, these forbidden areas, stir up in me an impulse, the drive needed to transform pure visual enjoyment into the object of an installation.

So I put aside what is known to me – the colour – and took up a tool from 1956, the Leica M3, an analog camera that I recovered over three decades later to discern that other place with photographic precision, focusing and reinterpreting an elusive, unstable, altered reality. I wish to observe the economy of visual elements, barely connecting the lines, their joints and fractures, their directions, allowing the virtual areas derived from this process to remind us – given their orthogonal configuration – of electric systems.

High Voltage gathers all those suspended, aerial lines that up high serve as a pathway for particles to travel from one place to another, generating a flux of electrons, forming closed circuits: a metaphor for the aesthetic proposal that is taking place in this room. A continuum strings together each of these four installations which, through a diversity of linear elements and using different scales, materials, supports, tones, establish among each other a steady transmission of meanings, of content. The savage energy, conducted and controlled by these strange, reticular machines, unfolds eagerly in all of the present works, springing from the same original impulse: the use of the recovered camera.