Hands that gather and forget: Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz, Sebastián Rodríguez y Vasti
Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto
September 8–October 2, 2020
I perform a series of manual gestures leaving the gallery: a parting wave, a pump of sanitizer, one curt pull to open the door, another to unmask, and a plunge into my pocket to retrieve my phone. My touches continue as I walk away from Xpace and its artworks, unpausing a podcast or sighting my phone’s camera on the spectacles that beckon me home through Toronto’s west end.
This procession of gestures moves me away from , an installation work by Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz and Sebastián Rodríguez y Vasti, which showed comprises an archive of images selected from a merged collection of photographs taken between 2015 and 2019 during the artists’ annual trips to their family homes in Venezuela. Printed on silk organza, the scenes—embraces, portraits, seascapes, and domestic interiors—hang by their corners, dispersed among a cloudscape of white gauze. The fabrics confront the viewer as a diaphanous mass animated by currents of air, inviting the viewer to enter, brush aside the immensity of the archive’s blanks, and pull an image up by its corner. Even then, the photographs that stand out against the countless absences barely register on the silk whispering in the din of the gauze.
