MIMESIS
Place: Joachim Gallery, Berlín, Alemania
Dimensions: Dimensions variable.
Year: Octubre 2004

The project titled “Mimesis” engages the space of the gallery in a strategy centered on the deployment of small, serialized objects bearing a direct relationship to the human body, particularly the role of the hand and the act of pulling in order to move a larger object (box, door, suitcase, etc.) For this purpose, multiple objects such as doorknobs, handles, knobs, etc. have been selected from a wide range of objects and designs determined by the context in which such objects are found.
Although there are many types of designs and “generic families,” such families exist in relation to their function (the nature of the object), which is always to move an object or weight greater than itself, that is, the principle according to which smallness of structure and scale is in no way an impediment to move a larger object. The interesting thing about this is the possible application of this notion to plastic issues, deploying smaller objects within a larger space and working within a context different from the one pre-defined in the design of each original object, displacing that space and imposing a new quality upon the cast objects, that of creating tension within and displacing a larger structure: the gallery.

My purpose is to reinstate the value of an object that is completely banal by displacing it in an act of spatial occupation that allows for a re-assessment of that object at the service of a new totality that is both attractive and interesting from a plastic point of view, with mimesis as a dimension of inertia in the realization of this project, that is, as the fact of working with the “nature” of these objects at the service of artistic work.

The material and color used—white plaster—has a specific meaning in connection with the unconscious blending into the environment of these objects, that is, in connection with the fact that in its domestic context, the banality of the object removes it from the scope of our attention. The material and color used here respond to that same premise in a massive redeployment of these objects within a plastic context, one in which I produce this blending precisely on the basis of color, material and density, just like in the domestic (unconscious) context.
  The object’s loss of contextual identity and its re-invention both physically (by its serialization, material and color) and conceptually, through its displacement (loss of function and redeployment within a new context), cause a dislocation of the conventional gaze through which we see them.

The aim of the work proposed is not to become an elegy to the small object. Instead, it aims to highlight the intrinsic plastic value of each one of these forms and the possible manifestations that one same object can generate.

Mimesis: from the Latin Mimesis
-In Classic aesthetics, the imitation of nature, essential aim of art.
-In Classic poetry, imitation in art of the nature of things understood as the object of art.

Technical Description:
Two thousand two hundred and fifty pieces in white plaster (different forms and sizes), cast from original objects.
Approximate surface used in the gallery, 50 square meters / dimensions variable.

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