Exhibits,

Emanuel Rodriguez Chaves darkroom/The Assassination of Viviana Gallardo

Opening: Wednesday 6 June 2018, 6 - 8pm Dates: 6 June - 30 June, 2018

My current work aims to understand how strategies and qualities within painting and image can be used to develop multimedia environments to generate new aesthetic experiences and motivate the creation of new knowledge. It argues and questions how our traditional notions of painting can no longer be sustained by the mere application of paint on canvas. Boundaries, motivations and strategies must shift, from a material and superficial conception to a conceptual and intellectual standpoint, where painting as a language tries to reinsert certain philosophical, political and ethical issues.

For darkroom/Viviana I use a specific case as structure and motif, to try to question and insert an expanded notion of painting into play: The Marxist-Leninist organisation based in Costa Rica named by the Media as La Familia (The Family, 1981) and the assassination of Viviana Gallardo. The case serves as a stimulus to insert painting into contemporary discussions and to question its role as language and communicator in current society. How can art reconstruct, comment and update these past events?

Emanuel was born in Costa Rica in 1986. He studied Fine Arts at the University of Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica from 2005-2012, and at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee, Berlin KhB, under the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) from 2013-2015. He is currently a PhD Candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, where his research examines images as elements in the construction of memory and knowledge, via databases, printed photos, and digital resources. These images are enhanced and distorted, to modify meaning and agency.

info at www.emanuelrodriguez.net

Catalogue:
“The Images that Deceived Us”
Text by Katie Paine
2018