OPENING FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24TH, 7 – 9 PM
REVERSE is pleased to host Cecilia Avendaño’s first solo show in New York. BLOW confronts us with disturbingly beautiful portraits, which are both seductive and unsettling. The exhibition consists of large-scale, digitally manipulated photographs printed on canvas, representative of the gross mediation of advertisement and technology in today’s elaboration of personal identity.
The portrait photographs are made with a digital technique whereby selected elements from a base of previously photographed models by the artist are merged to create beings. Thus, even though they are born from a portion of reality, in their final version, they exist as forms that escape strict mimicry.
Just as disturbing as their beauty, is the fact that these inanimate women-girls appear to breathe, as the canvases slowly plunge into movement by means of a mechanical system implanted behind the portraits. In this way, the images physically move, taking a step further from their reality, escaping almost imperceptibly from their frames.
Avendaño’s images seem to come from an existentialist comic cut, but as fictional as they might appear, they hold truth in presenting themselves as what they are: overly staged combinations of eyes, mouths, skin, and hair; ultimately, images becoming images. These works tell several stores that emerge from a face, one that sometimes seems stereotypical and sometimes tangible, and move in that thin line between dream and reality.
Cecilia Avendaño graduated from the University of Chile, studying Visual Arts and majoring in Photography. She has exhibited her work since 2002, participating in numerous group exhibitions in Chile and abroad. Selected solo shows include Sala Cero at Animal Gallery, National Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Chile, Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires Argentina, and her participation at BAC! Festival in Barcelona’s MACBA. Her most recent work involves digital post production operations on photography where she composes images that become portraits, but operate with different concepts relating to identity construction. She has been selected two times for the Chilean National Fund for Arts FONDART, and was awarded second place in the art contest “Artists of the XXI Century” organized by the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and Banco Santander. She currently lives and works in Santiago, Chile.
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