EXHIBITIONS
Wave Drawing Nos. 11—12
Artinformal
2017
The act of transcription does not reproduce, it represents. The transcript proposes but an interpretation of the material and immaterial factors that engender its origin. Translating the immaterial to the visible cannot be absolute as the initial conditions of production are in flux, manifesting through aberrations present in the document. The process itself is subject to a number of fluctuating variables, the method is rendered indeterminate, and the system is open(ed). No two points of origin are identical; minute differences in notation arise from the gaps and folds in the waves of time and energy that influence the unpredictable process of production.
In Wave Drawing Nos. 11—12, Nice Buenaventura works with hand-drawn representations of the invisible currents that guide the simultaneous acts of production and documentation, emphasizing the presence of what is ostensibly absent. The central pieces are part of an ongoing series titled Wave Drawing, wherein vibrations caused by the movement of the artist’s drawing hand are recorded, the resulting graph of the gesture translated into a gradient in which a band’s darkness corresponds to the size of the wave. The end result is the documentation of the entirety of this process, which is itself a process of documentation.
Buenaventura expounds upon this theme through a number of concomitant series: a set of nine grid drawings that resemble a calendar of nine weeks, depicting the disproportionate amount of time dedicated to the act of drawing, and an array of drawings from the cutting room floor arranged upon a pin board. Punctuating the space is an installation of green salt cast in the shapes of the negative spaces in the corners of the artist’s home, mirroring the ritual of placing mounds of salt in the corners of a structure to attract favorable conditions. Negative space becomes an object in space; the absent is made present.
Wave Drawing Nos. 11—12 presents a collection of documents of and about documentation, exploring the links between the mundane and ritualistic, between the perceptible and the intangible.
— Itos Ledesma
