Review | "Short Journey: wher...

Generated on 2021-04-27 18:45:40

Result #1

"Short Journey: where do we go from here?" is a project that creates a space for reflection, exploring human emotions and feelings, anxieties, pleasures and desires, love, and dreams from a universal perspective. Using her personal experience and memory, the artist discovers her own identity and enters into a delicate, mischievous game with the viewer through "words," trying to break the boundaries of her mind, body, comfort, through which a person can reveal herself. Valentina Maz seems to invite a short, pleasant, and light journey to share her personal experience, common concerns and create an area with no borders. <|startoftext|>In 1992, Valentina Mazzei underwent plastic surgery, and six years later she completed her first solo exhibition. She has continued her exploration of the body and its functions in her latest work, the video The Year in a Mirror: The Body of the Self in Its Evolution, 2006, and the drawings Mapping the Territory, 2004–2006, and more recently, Palindrome, 2006, a set of works based on the ancient Palpitoadra of Greece. This is not the first time the artist has used plastic surgery—she did it last year in her exhibition at the Palazzale della Vergine, Hermitude, Venice, Italy.The video presents an interview in which Mazzei refers to herself as an artist-subject, and she categorically defines herself as a woman. In this way, the work questions the gender of the subject, but not in order to malign the female subject; instead, the video demonstrates that the female body has no gender. The question of gender functions as a metaphor for the balance of hormones and the parts of the body that contain them. Although the camera does not record the operation on Mazzei, the surgical operation is definitely visible: a massive scar on her face, which partially fills the entire screen. This scar, which Mazzei refers to as the phallus, appears as a sign of power over the female body, which Mazzei would like to put to rest.The video, which was created in collaboration with Ludovica Cassini, follows the artists own journey to the Palazzale della Vergine. In the midst of the exhibition, a nurse approaches her and offers to apply makeup to her face. The procedure is done with great professionalism and very little makeup is applied to the face; the image of the face floating on the air is strong, but it does not fully capture the beauty of the operation.

Result #2

"Short Journey: where do we go from here?" is a project that creates a space for reflection, exploring human emotions and feelings, anxieties, pleasures and desires, love, and dreams from a universal perspective. Using her personal experience and memory, the artist discovers her own identity and enters into a delicate, mischievous game with the viewer through "words," trying to break the boundaries of her mind, body, comfort, through which a person can reveal herself. Valentina Maz seems to invite a short, pleasant, and light journey to share her personal experience, common concerns and create an area with no borders. <|startoftext|>In the late 80s, the Russian artist Valentina Mazino became known for her work on display in the Hessen Museum. Among her visual statements, she often quotes the words of Vladimir Mayakovsky—who she most often resembles—as she recalls the painful experiences she had when her parents threw her off the roof of their house in Cherkas region of Krasnala-Ude in southern Russia in 1987. The opening of her exhibition in the newly renovated Prenzlannium gallery was therefore a perfect introduction to Mazinistic aesthetics. Since the artists work is nonnarrative, it can only be experienced as a dialogue between the artists own recollections and the work of others.Through the exhibition, the viewer was invited to hear her reflections about her experiences in Paris and in a psychiatric hospital. Mazino is a kind of semi-open woman, who sometimes admits to her desire to use psychoactive substances. She regularly uses the bathroom as a space of exploration and to reaffirm a sense of self. She looks at self-doubt, and uses words to reflect on the distance between oneself and the world, and on the limitations of knowing who or what one is. The voices of two women have been added to her earlier pieces: their voices were heard from the outside of the gallery, and were picked up by the visitors. Their voices can be heard as if on a phone. They are, after all, Mazinistic voices, in the same way that are Valentina Mazino and Thomas Bayrle. Of course, there is a difference between the two artists: Bayrle uses sign language, and Mazinistic symbolism; Mazino uses painterly representation. The three works in her show in Paris were made from cardboard boxes—a typical box—that have been cut into irregular shapes and then remade in cardboard.

Result #3

"Short Journey: where do we go from here?" is a project that creates a space for reflection, exploring human emotions and feelings, anxieties, pleasures and desires, love, and dreams from a universal perspective. Using her personal experience and memory, the artist discovers her own identity and enters into a delicate, mischievous game with the viewer through "words," trying to break the boundaries of her mind, body, comfort, through which a person can reveal herself. Valentina Maz seems to invite a short, pleasant, and light journey to share her personal experience, common concerns and create an area with no borders. <|startoftext|>In her recent exhibition, Audiogr.tni, Valentina Mazza, whose native city is in the province of Pozzuoli in Italy, made a strong impression. This was a colorfully decorated exhibition. The light that shone through the heavy curtains of the gallery was felt as a dialogue with the surrounding space and the sun, creating an intense emotional atmosphere. The text that Mazza had written in three languages, in Italian, French, and English, was printed on three walls of the space, in English, Italian, and Spanish. This series of articles was accompanied by an impressive series of photographs, a montage of different expressions of these texts. These photographs were hung on the wall in the gallery, and seemed to follow a line from Bad Weather: if you love the weather, stop the wind . . . it is good.In her daily work, Mazza carries on the dialogue between words and images, between inner and outer reality. She wants to dismantle the image of the other, to dissolve the border that separates the two, to focus on the essential condition of the other. In this series of works, she investigates how the boundaries of culture, personal and private, form a reflection of cultural and personal identity, but not of the other. She investigates the symbolic possibilities of images that unite different countries and languages. Mazza asks: Are they equally good, equally interesting, or, are they merely symbolic and representative of their respective cultures? Her question, in two parts, is answered by a series of photographs of the walls of a room, taken by the artist herself. And she asks: What happens when we examine our personal experiences and explore the boundaries between things, or between culture and itself? These images find a direct reference in everyday life. They are therefore, sensitively symbolic and therefore allow the viewer to question the coherence of cultural systems.

Result #4

"Short Journey: where do we go from here?" is a project that creates a space for reflection, exploring human emotions and feelings, anxieties, pleasures and desires, love, and dreams from a universal perspective. Using her personal experience and memory, the artist discovers her own identity and enters into a delicate, mischievous game with the viewer through "words," trying to break the boundaries of her mind, body, comfort, through which a person can reveal herself. Valentina Maz seems to invite a short, pleasant, and light journey to share her personal experience, common concerns and create an area with no borders. <|startoftext|>As if to emphasize the need for distance between viewers and the objects that they encounter, the show opened with a video in which she walked a wooden bridge across a row of metal fences. She had also invited the viewer to engage with her drawings, which were on display in the rear gallery. In a simple, cryptic context, the installation revealed a reflective, self-referential, and self-reflexive aspect of the artist.The videos and drawings in the gallery all have similar narratives, a male narrator and a female narrator, but the narratives are different and involve different images and objects. Two black-and-white photos show the men walking or sitting with backs turned to the camera; the work is titled Objete (Oblique); two black-and-white photos show the women passing through a doorway to a nearby road; one is called Natura Natura (Nature) and the other, Città (City). The video opens with a shot of a white-robed man walking past a large wooden fence. The video shows the men and women in the various attire of a group of urban gypsies; the camera is fixed on the head of the male narrator, who is unaware that he is being photographed. These two images are paired in a close-up of his face against a similarly framed background, the foreground showing the male narrator and the female narrator with a faded waterfall in the background. After a while, the men begin to put on clothing, which they begin to put on but do not remove altogether, and eventually revert to a more comfortable state. The identity of the viewer is revealed only in the photograph that represents the gypsies; even here, the identity of the spectator is obscured, even as the photographer, who is identified only as the photographer, is glimpsed as the female narrator.

Result #5

"Short Journey: where do we go from here?" is a project that creates a space for reflection, exploring human emotions and feelings, anxieties, pleasures and desires, love, and dreams from a universal perspective. Using her personal experience and memory, the artist discovers her own identity and enters into a delicate, mischievous game with the viewer through "words," trying to break the boundaries of her mind, body, comfort, through which a person can reveal herself. Valentina Maz seems to invite a short, pleasant, and light journey to share her personal experience, common concerns and create an area with no borders. <|startoftext|>The work of Valentina Mazzei is based on the ideas of a north wind, which emanates from the spirit that guides and sustains everything. The title of the exhibition, Velynazofsky.org, is taken from the Bulgarian word for breath, which literally means: If you live under a dome, you must breathe inside it. It is with this aesthetic of anchoring that Mazzei invokes the south wind, and therefore the spiritual potential of an outer and visible space, in the work of the artist.The piece consists of four elements: an anchor set in a wooden box; a toy dog; a piece of paper covered with black ink; and a zigzag, three-dimensional sculpture. It takes the viewer through a circle, a circle created by crossing the distance between two points. The artist himself seems to become a mind for the mind of the spectator, a reader who knows and is familiar with the outside world, a spectator to be immersed in it. The effect of the piece is an oasis, a place from which all other points are hidden.The viewers walking through the work find themselves in a strange place, in a deadpan, hidden room. At one spot, two iron nails protrude from the wooden floor and point toward the pieces anchor, a wooden structure that seems ready to collapse. At another, a small dog stares out of a box that is itself closed by another iron nail. Near a third, a red letter has been placed on the floor of the box. Behind this letter is a small, closely packed box filled with objects, then turned inside out with a metal ring. A small mirror, a door, a block of wood, and a couple of iron nails create the form of a western landscape that is split in half and reversed.