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Artists’ Television Access

January 5 - February 1, 2009

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992 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110
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The Weight of Things Paper clay, 8 1/2" x 11" ea. Pc, 200 pc. variable dimension installation
The Weight of Things Installation by Rosalía Bermúdez Reception with artist Tuesday, January 6 - 7pm-10pm This installation explores the limitations of corporeality and absence, the conventions of presence, and the weight of what once was and then dis-appears. What is the nature of the materiality of objects? What determines the weight of things? How does presence manifest itself in the absence of the corporeal, the textual, the tangible? Do things exist only when we perceive their absence, when the object, once removed remains only as memory? Paper, crafted from paper clay to imitate the folds and twists caused by wind is arranged in a random and scattered progression where it gathers upon the walls and the ceiling towards the back of the room, as if it were being pushed by the force of the wind. Occupying an entire room, the paper is statically levitated existing in a state of suspended animation in space and time, in a nowhere-place. The visual element is complemented by a looped sound component consisting of layered audio of wind and a reading of the poem Hay Cadaveres, by Nestor Perlongher. It is a disembodied voice, in an empty room evocative in itself, of the disappeared (prisoners of the Argentine dictatorship) which the poem recounts. The words are never manifest upon the paper with the permanence of a visible text – they are transitory, provisional. The blank page is a tabula rassa - they could be any words. And yet, words have their weight, they are loaded and heavy, they mark moments in time and charge spaces with meaning, even if they have disappeared or been swept away by the wind.