ELISA SIGICHELLI
GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
Artist(s): Elisa Sighicelli
Date(s): Till 10 June 2007
GAM, the modern art gallery of Turin, is continuing its presentations of new generation artists with a personal exhibition of Elisa Sigichelli, one of the most prominent young Italian artists. Six video projections and five partially illuminated light-box photographs will be on display in the exhibition hall dedicated to current-day art and photography on the ground floor.
In her works, Elisa Sigichelli is constantly exploring the dynamics of vision, through a particular technique: photographs, printed on paper, and applied to a Plexiglas surface, which is partially painted on the rear and lit by one or more electric light sources. They are shots of interiors, day-to-day places in which the anonymity of appearances lives side by side with the familiarity of the viewer’s gaze. The corner of a table, (Horizontal Blank, 2002), a detail of a bed (Iceland: Blue Bed, 2001), the shadow of the foot of an armchair (Parlour, 2002), a curtain (Corner window, 2003) or a plant (Plant, 2000) are pictures that are rid of any personal reference context, permeated with a feeling of absence that generates an atmosphere, which is outlined by their narrative potential rather than by the existence of a specific meaning.
Partially retro-illuminated light-boxes allow Elisa Sigichelli to create an unparalleled suggestion not attainable with conventional photography whose nature is to fix a moment in time, transforming it automatically into the past: “By using electric light behind certain areas of the picture, I aim to create a moment that is continuously present and thus continuously open. The lit areas in the photograph clash with its planar nature, generating a number of spatial planes and increasing its depth”.
Turin’s GAM exhibition itinerary unfolds amid photographic images and videos – techniques through which the artist develops a parallel research to the point of mixing up its results.
The significance that light and darkness achieve in the perception of the image, as well as the sense of contemplation, attained through an exasperation of the void and a rarefaction of the atmosphere, are conveyed by the videos, in which Sigichelli transforms the narration into pure meditation, as in Dance-bound, a new video produced in 2007, where seahorses dance in the dark, entwined in a three-dimensional choreography.
The Nocturne (Trajectories) video is similar to a drawing. Having been shot at night from above, the video transforms the river into an empty space where illuminated boats float drawing trajectories of light, achieving a result that is somewhere in between abstraction and reality.
In Nocturne (Red) and Nocturne (Blue), a single detail, on the banks of the river at night, is captured by a still camera, almost as if it were a photograph. The flowing of time, imperceptible, is marked by the movement of reflexes on the water while the evoked staticity and silence generate a sense of expectation.
In Nocturne (Left Bank), the camera moves on a single sequence-plane: a small number of lights, along the banks of a river at night, suddenly reveal, in the dark, buildings and glimpses of life that are then swallowed-up again by the darkness of the night.
A different sensation is generated by Non-stop exotic cabaret, a monitor-projected video of 2007. Captured from above, a figure swims in a swimming pool until it disappears out of the shot. Thanks to a reversed montage of the same sequence, the swimmer reappears swimming backwards, with an impossible movement that is natural at the same time.
Elisa Sighicelli was born in Turin in 1968 and divides her existence between Turin and London. Her last personal exhibitions: The River Suite, Gagosian Gallery, London (2006); Phi, Giò Marconi, Milano, (2006); Elisa Sighicelli, Cohan and Leslie, New York (2005); Sottovoce, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena (2005); Elisa Sighicelli, Fondation Salomon, Annecy (2003); Frost, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles (2001) She participated in important collective exhibitions, such as Liquid Sea, MCA, Sidney (2003); No world Without you, Hertzliya Museum, Tel Aviv (2001); The Mind is a Horse Part 2, Bloomberg Space, Londra (2005); Barrocos y Neobarrocos, DA2, 2002, Salamanca (2005); Expo 21: Strategies of Display, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham e Warwick Art Centre, Coventry (2004)
GAM - GALLERIA CIVICA D'ARTE MODERNA E CONTEMPORANEA
Via Magenta 31
10128 Torino
ITALY
Tel:: +39 011 4429518
Opening Hours:
Collections
Tuesday - Sunday, 10.00 a.m. - 7.00 p.m. Monday closed
Exhibitions
Tuesday - Sunday, 10.00 a.m. - 7.00 p.m.
Thursday 10.00 a.m. - 11.00 p.m. Monday closed
Admission:
€ 7,50 full - € 6,00 discount
Free on first thuesday of the month
Website: www.gamtorino.it & www.fondazionetorinomusei.it
Image Credits: Dance Bound, Elisa Sigichelli
