Exhibition

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Fractures

Nona Garcia

July 27 - August 14, 2010

Gallery 1-4

In Fractures, Nona Garcia continues to chronicle and examine the lore of disorder and disarray, that can be mundane, infinitesimal, or catastrophic personal legends of breakage and calamity represented by events and objects of domestic habitation, events and objects that move and shatter within our common realm: broken glass, crushed cans, crumpled paper, and from the land where we remain against deluge, an abundant sight of submerged dwelling places.

In all their degraded state, Nona persistently and remarkably finds new methods to depict their transformations, in such painstaking manner like paper-tole, painting in photo-realism, and making negative prints from x-rays to address her interest in reconstructing new forms out of these otherwise ‘unadorned’ images. The result is a seeming paradox of an image of exactness out of their randomness. Through the meticulousness of paper-tole the disarray of furniture, the flotsam of goods from a kitchen that is flooded waist-high become elements inside a miniature fantasy-world. As they are reconstructed with depth and are framed inside a glass, the calamitous event somehow becomes akin to dollhouses, fairy tales and the ornamental nature of decoupage.

This randomness prevails in her x-rays of broken objects–diverse household objects like glass, decorative plates, tin cans, watches and figurines, which when shattered into pieces, their prints portray a new form of almost abstract and unrecognizable form. And this fusion of exactness and randomness becomes more evident in painting an image of crumpled paper repetitively and in multitude. Making one replica after another becomes an exercise of finding the truest form out of a form conceived through chance, and the randomness of an incalculable act like that of crumpling paper, easy to perform in a split second, makes the actual object almost more unreal and unworthy of our attention than the object inside the painting.

Although brokenness, deformity, and wreckage can be ascribed to be an object’s worst fate, these conditions through Nona’s vision are necessary destinations to transform them out of their predictability and to metamorphose into their own identity, eternally different from any other shard of glass, from any crack of wood, from any tear of paper or iron rust as they acquire their own blueprint through the randomness of form with each unique devastation, each unique disaster—where Nona assumes the role not as mender for each broken part, but as of myth-maker.