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Artist Statement

Statement

|   Statement
Statement | what images can do - José Antonio Navarrete - artmedia GALLERY - Miami FL - 305
Untitled #1, Glasses, Central Park, New York, November 2012

I displayed items for personal use to intervene and modify spaces both physically and emotionally. In principle, then, the idea was to take the camera to document an individual action executed in a particular location. The photographs of What images can do are records of these interventions in the space.

In any case, it was my interest that each record had a distinct potential of seduction. It did not even matter to me—and now it matters still less—whether the image became independent from my intention and started acting differently. I find it interesting that, in the process of reception, spectators can see the pictures from a diverse perspective to that from which they were conceived and made. As it is well known, authorial intentions do not define the possible meanings of a piece of work; they merely stand as a discursive instance of that work.

Precisely, how images gain relative independence from their original motivations, in the process of being circulated, stimulated me the most during the development of this project. I was interested in how they generate that which we could call “their independent behavior.” In other words, in how images communicate with each other in such a way that they detonate readings unforeseen in the concept behind and the process of making them.

This "independence" of images is a problem of interest to exhibition curatorship. From my point of view, it sets my artistic work at that meeting point or exchange between artistic practice and curatorial practice. The latter is a practice with which I have held, to this day, a long relationship.