Exhibition in Seoul, KOREA
"DE BELLO NATURAE della natura, le sfide"
2016.07.30 - 08.31
PETER CAMPUS (USA)
KATHLEEN J. GRAVES (USA)
ANTONIO TRIMANI (ITA)
ITO LIM (KOR)
Seoul Metropolitan Government - City gallery & City Plaza
Focusing our attention on the exhibition’s artists that we present to our citizens, even if they adopt two different modes of expression, they share the same means of recording real life, photography and video. These artists will exhibit works which illustrate the relationship of conflict between human beings and nature in four different ways.
This project has the aim of traveling to different places and countries and with each step will change and adopt a new visual and thematic and artistic additions and enrichment. Begun in Italy, this show is now approaching our city capital. In Seoul the three artist are enriched by meeting and adding to their exhibition the Korean photographer Ito Lim. It is not a chance encounter, all the artists in the exhibition have as their object nature. We can say as if we where Latin,‘de bello naturae’.
Peter Campus has created an interpretation of the nature inhabited by people working at its edges. Fishermen and their boats often reflect the necessity to work with nature rather than to overwhelm it. The curves and forms and lines of these seiners and trawlers make reference both to the work of fishing and the ocean that surrounds them. The mistake to believe the utilitarian as drab is denied by the beauty of these boats: the two shown here, worn by the sea, present their beauty without regards to their temporality. Along with these are the depiction of two pleasure boats, less concerned with the sea than to be appealing. They stand against utility. They serve to impress, and sit unconcerned that the oceans will eventually overwhelm them.
Kathleen J Graves work focuses on nature and technology. The artist imagines artificial creatures called NanoBots who are new life forms blending into the landscape. The Dark Garden reflects on changes in weather and the recent flooding where Graves lives on Long Island, New York. In these images, both the sensation of flooding water and the imaginary creatures called Bots observe the environment and expose diverse environmental challenges and fears. These cautionary images respond to the human joy of gardens and landscape and Graves belief in presenting new technology in a visual way. Additionally, the harbinger of being watched by our technology asserts itself.
The electronic landscapes by Antonio Trimani invite us to contemplate, making this function associated with memories that are ancient and ancestral yet near to us now, more than ever. Marco Tonelli wrote these words: “If Magritte had had a way to use video, he would have certainly represented his revelations about daily life in the same way Antonio Trimani does. For example, by suspending a boulder in the middle of the sky as a
sudden apparition (Rivelation, 2013).Trimani’s work often lives on these subtle epiphanies which alter their physical essence according to the times and places charged with a color-changing anticipation like the Chora, 2015 video on exhibit. Here time is like an evanescent material, not only because it is diluted in these times of digital images but because it is expanded along ultra-sensitive and changing colored trajectories exactly like the sensitivity of the subject and our perceptive apparatus. Daily visions in the electronic flow, the works of Trimani make everything real that can be observed in the banality of our daily lives seem unreal and metaphysical thanks to the dreaminess of the composition in his videos”.
Lastly, Ito Lim represents the enrichment figure of this project, which in Korea lays the foundation to add new elements, new perspectives, new visual experiences to exhibitions.Viewers will appreciate the atmosphere, sus- pended in Lims black and white images. Fabrizio pizzuto wrote these words: " Ito Lim views images in their poetry, in their possibility of becoming introspection, and highlights their characteristics. The loneliness caused by a lack of human figures in all images has the role of a focalization, an attention, a spotlight on man himself, who is behind the camera and not before it. The image belongs to man’s eye and seems to be emanated by his eye. As such it is a mirror of both the author and the consumer, each one in his own loneliness, joined together in an image that is the vehicle of a touchingly being lost in thought."
