Catalina Mena_Fragile_05/25/15_07/25/15

“Fragile” is the first collaboration of Catalina Mena (Santiago de Chile, 1971) with Ángeles Baños Gallery. For this project, his first individual in our Gallery has prepared a series of works that ambiguity, instability and fragility of everyday life in relation to the unpredictable or unknown, to the bizarre.

The sentence of the Great Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral “I seek a verse that I have lost”, that welcomes us into the Gallery, is the statement that articulates all of the exhibition project. Hand-embroidered on the edge of a set of varied models kitchen knives, this decontextualized phrase refers us to a search for any anchor, a thread that hold the fragile relationship and the memory of our everyday lives. A subtle, yet powerful gesture that visually, seeks to point out these objects in their next reality, to thus recover those objects that have become invisible to our eyes.

Once crossed the hall/threshold of the Gallery, the rest of objects -cups, jugs, dishes and more embroidery and pierced knives- are raised and they are arranged in space as if they were ghosts who demand to be recovered, at the same time that account of the presence/absence of the habitat. Work that involves the tying and knotting is established as a metaphor for reconstruction-memoria, creating a network of consciousness activated by memories associated with these objects. Its precarious and unstable presence metaphorically alludes to the fragility in relation to memory as the axis of direction us constituting.

The set of papers is completed with a group of folders recovered from oblivion to be restored and intervened with embroidery. These present images associated with different concepts that relate to our language and way of being in the world, what we will constitute as related beings around a communication complex and full of subjectivities, which in turn is associated with the memory of each, to subjectivity and hence the fragility as a sense of the human quality.