Columns, (Pompeii I & ii), 2013
Pompeii I, 2013
plaster, wire and wooden base
158 x 43 x 43 cm
Columns (Pompeii I & 2) were made during a residency at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in São Paulo and exhibited at Casa Triângulo, 2013.
Each of the works in the São Paulo show examines these questions in different ways, with an insistent, repetitive focus on bodily gesture and the relationship between this gesture and its material traces—the images, shapes, objects, environments that remain after the gesture has been completed. In Columns, for example, we encounter two lumpy white plaster columns, the height of an average woman [about five and a half feet], punctured by large asymmetrical holes. The inside surfaces of these apertures have the texture of skin; they are not cut directly through the column, but bend partway through, obscuring our view. The hollows are fleshy casts from parts of the Cerqueira Leite’s body that bend— elbows, wrists, knees. But the relationship between these bends and the rigid sculptural form is one of tension rather than ease: capturing the bending of joints, the artist illustrates the body’s capacity to move while, paradoxically, doing so through freezing its movement into the inverse of the cast body part. Rather than “reading” the forms as “representations” of bodily movement through space and time, we experience the forms as bodily extensions that convey a process of the body’s having moved in the past, a process rearticulated as artistic form [rendered static] in the present. - Amelia Jones(Tracing the Body: Gesture and Materiality in the Work of Juliana Cerqueira Leite)
Pompeii II, 2013
plaster, wire and wooden base
150 x 42 x 42 cm