Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Venice: Alma Zevi – Andraste – Miriam Austin - Exhibition


Photograph by Enrico Fiorese – courtesy Alma Zevi

Alma Zevi
Miriam Austin - Andraste
Miriam Austin’s exhibition at Alma Zevi is named Andraste after the Celtic war goddess, until April 28. It is the first exhibition in Italy for the London based New Zealand-er for which she has produced new works including collages and aluminum sculptures which explore the relationship between ritual, myth, ecological fragility, and the politics of the body.

 Photograph by Enrico Fiorese – courtesy Alma Zevi

Miriam Austin - Andraste
For her exhibition Austin further developed her ongoing sculptural series Tools. These steel and aluminum sculptures have been carefully arranged by the artist as a site-specific installation for the gallery. The objects are self-referential, but have also been used for performances that are choreographed by the artist. With undertones of Austin’s interest in folklore, magical rites and rituals, the works are also intrinsically linked to a British landscape through the exhibition title, Andraste. This is a homage to the war goddess of the same name, who was invoked by Boudica in her fight against the Roman occupation in Britain in AD 60.

  Photograph courtesy Alma Zevi

Miriam Austin

 Photograph by Enrico Fiorese – courtesy Alma Zevi

Miriam Austin – Andraste
Austin has created entirely new collages, printing on silk for the first time. With the collages’ titles rich in associations’ - Ritual for the Sterile Seed and Lotus - Austin introduces the viewer to another facet of her work. Here she uses computer programs, in a pseudo-rudimentary way, creating imagery that combines contemporary and ancient symbols.   The layering of meaning in these pieces is inextricable from the physical layering of visual references. The backgrounds of the collages recall the texture of skin, but are in fact taken from aerial photographs of a series of coral atols and reefs. This confrontation between micro and macro, and the suggestion of the endless repetitions found in nature, is intrinsic in Austin’s work. And, as in her sculptural work, she creates a disconnected sensation, engaging ancient and modern, but with no suggested bridging point between the two.

 
Alma Zevi


 
Miriam Austin – Andraste
In all of Austin’s work shown in Venice, she offers the viewer a new perspective on the binaries of the natural and the unnatural, the sacred and the profane. This narrative aims to situate such oppositions within our contemporary life. Venice, with its complex socio-political and ecological current situation, seems an apt setting for the artist’s investigation into our relationships with history, industry, and artifice.


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