To Hold is To Be Held

https://mandevilleartgallery.ucsd.edu/exhibitions/to-hold-is-to-be-held.html

The impulse to find meaning in the way an object or image is displayed or housed within a framing structure or device, speaks of our capacity to envision something as whole, in order to understand its context and connect with it. By intervening the frame itself, or that which contains, holds, or supports their images, the artists in this exhibition approach image- and object-making by courageously reversing the value-system of the gaze and reflecting it back acknowledging its implicit performativity. Working across film/video, painting, photography, and sculpture, the cohort’s individual conceptual practices seize the function of the frame to make whole and heal the hauntings of the layered detritus that remains after ritual and life itself.

For many of these artists, the container becomes a portal that allows the vantage point to be questioned, making the viewer and what is being seen part of a cycle where places are reversed and exchanged. Whether guarding images of private moments of interior domestic life inside the architectural structure of a door and its frame, which reveals different information open or closed; recreating architectural scaffoldings built temporarily for rituals; or holding personal possessions or intimate portraits of family members inside a self-constructed frame that in some instances include the indexicality of other objects molded as the screen or transparent surface to look into a picture, the hierarchy of the gaze is contested, as what is being looked at wants to hold us and look into us as well. For the artists working in film and video, time is a negotiation of existence and its memory, where oneself and the other–the body performing for or looking into the camera becoming one with the subject, or the subject reaching us like cosmic light that has extinguished a long time ago but it has transformed by the time it reaches us, image making is almost alchemical, with repetition and loss of information (re)framing transformation.

Not unlike the direct references to reliquaries of memory or residues of existence, an occurring motif in the work of these artists is the presence of hands performing an action or communing with time to illustrate its passage and how we all hold each other’s histories and can hold each other up. Images or objects are held by something that works like a bridge between them and ourselves, and is this radical act that transforms the relationship between viewer and image-object. We feel held by what we are holding, and vice versa, and are accountable for what is lost and what remains in this process of becoming ourselves keepers and ancestors.

- Selene Preciado

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Host or Publisher UC San Diego Visual Arts