Alice Quaresma “Home”
Pablo's Birthday
[Image: Alice Quaresma "FARAWAY" (2020) Gouache paint, sticker, and color tape over photographic print 30 x 20 in.]
This event has ended.
Pablo’s Birthday presents the first solo exhibition of New York-based Brazilian artist Alice Quaresma at the gallery. The new body of work presented was conceived during the lockdown; thus, Quaresma has decidedly shifted the conceptualization of the exhibition and its physical display:
“My home became my studio. I stopped traveling, and the only place I could explore was within my imagination. My work is about deconstructing images I have taken in places I visited and revisited, like my hometown, Rio de Janeiro. I consider myself a traveler. What excites me the most is being in action”.
As the starting point for this project, Quaresma referred back to one of her favorite books, ‘Poetic of the Space’ by Gaston Bachelard. The book describes the physical space of a home while making you aware that a home is not only a space geographically located in a city but also an emotional connection to life’s journeys and the memories you carry with you.
The artist returned to images she has taken from the two cities where she feels at home: New York City and Rio de Janeiro. “As a good traveler, whenever I cannot physically be somewhere, I travel in my mind, I use my imagination.” At HOME, it is a series is a group of photo-based artworks that explore the idea of a utopian city. Each work overlaps images of NYC and Rio with color, geometrical and abstract forms to play around subjectivity and deconstruction of the descriptive elements in a photograph.
“I refer to my photo archive of Rio de Janeiro often, as a need to connect with my roots and for being geographically distant. I also have been photographing New York City for a long time, even before I moved here, but never felt the need to look back at these images. The first set of images I started to look at during the introspective time forced by the lockdown, were actually the ones from New York City; it was the place I missed the most.”
The new work connects and evolves within Quaresma’s previous series. Her interest lies in exposing dualities within images and the unexpected ways she thinks about photography. Her selected images never fall solely in the precision factor of a photo or a moment in the past and have an essential experiential component.
Alice Quaresma (1985 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) lives and works in Brooklyn. Quaresma has gained institutional attention in many different forms and has participated in exhibitions and residency programs in the US, Europe, and South America. In 2019, the artist was invited by Paris Photo to take part in the fair’s public programming, ‘The Artist Talks’ curated by Veronique Prugnaud. Her work has been featured in renowned publications, including critical reviews at Foam Magazine and Lens Culture. Additionally, she has recently launched her first artist’s book “Playground” (2019) with Éditions Bessard, Paris.
⠀
Alice Quaresma received her BFA in 2007 at Central St. Martins and her MFA in 2009 at Pratt Institute in New York. Later, she received a post-baccalaureate for History of Art at Columbia University in New York. She also was the second artist-in-residence in 2019 at Pablo’s Birthday Verbier Residency.
Media
Schedule
from September 17, 2020 to October 25, 2020
Opening Reception on 2020-09-26 from 12:00 to 18:00