Myths, Tales, and Allegories

Myths, Tales, and Allegories Unbound on a Mouthpiece

Imagine… the sky.

Neck tilted, cervical tense, thoracic stiff, lumbar vibrating, sacrum stretched, coccyx numb.

Temporal spilling, greater wing beating, frontal warming to rest on the orbital blade and drain pleasure into the lacrimal bone, evoking an image.

Jaw stretched, mental foramen and maxilla frayed as you glimpse the sky within yourself amidst all these reveries. This same deep, inflamed, and reflective sky, in the smoke of an intoxicated breath, at less than ninety degrees toward the upper pulpit of human ideas about the world.

The power to fabricate truths from what is seen.

Imagine, then, the devotion that rises with the breaking of the semitendinosus in descent, the firmness of the patella, and the impact of the tibialis anterior muscle on the ground!

The expansion of the visible as a system of faith.

Imagine, too, in the symphony of a single note conducted by many voices, the radioulnar joint burning and lifting radius and ulna in the surrender of carpus, metacarpus, and phalanges, palms turned to the stars.

The materialization of the image as a system of order

Everything absolute finds its place, the machinery of iconography stands tall, gesturing the propaganda of beauty, love, and war.

Images lie.

oooooooooooh, the stupor!

Yet still, disobey. Disorganize, disconfigure, disassemble, and disrupt every inch of the common sense that formalizes things, indoctrinated by the petty functions of deceitful power mechanisms that challenge the freedom of natural existence.

Disfigure.

Disfigure the image. Disfigure the image of the image, the image of the image of the image, and so on until the figure is no longer an image, and with it goes representation, personification, resemblance, symbol, imitation, copy, portrait, scene, icon, model, likeness, reflection, and replica, so that we may finally be completely consumed by the sensible.

Tell her that even the angels caught us dancing.

Igi Lola Ayedun

“In some of my works, I bring forward historical colonial images, such as in the piece ‘Contra-História,’ which features a laser engraving on marble stone depicting the reproduction of Victor Meirelles’ painting ‘Primeira Missa.’ This painting was funded by the empire of Pedro II with the intent to perpetuate a fabricated image that staged this initial process of the catechization of Indigenous peoples during the colonial period in a peaceful manner. Accompanying the work, a tool is available to viewers, offering the opportunity not only to erase but also to add to the scene as they wish, thus weaving a new narrative.

Upon entering the exhibition spaces, the visitor is confronted with a diverse array of never-before-seen iconographic pieces. At times figurative, at other times abstract, these new symbols provoke a reassessment of history: What is real? What determines that an image is worthy of worship? Where is the boundary between myth, tale, and allegory?”

— Gabriella Garcia

Gabriella Garcia
Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1992. Lives and works in São Paulo, Brasil.

Gabriella Garcia is a self-taught artist, whose practice moves between sculpture, painting and installations. With a process that took collage as a driving force in it’s beginning, Gabriella’s work includes not only where she is, but also where she derives from. Cutout figures take up space in works where plaster, fabric, polyurethane, empty space, metals, minerals, among others, dialogue in the construction of unique pieces that have in their compositions, magnetism as a tonic figure. The images in the artist’s constructions, be they bi or three-dimensional, work as if in a continuous effort of fusion: an incessant search for the assimilation of materials that, in their essences, bring in their materiality a unique reality and tangibility. The works put to test a vivid exercise of confrontation between gesture and nature; manipulation and relationship, creating a game where what is understood as terrain, is the unique possibility that the artistic gesture has of making brutality, lightness.