Timeframe

Timeframe

Installation, Abstract geometrical, Organic material, 550x6x1100cm
Jennifer López Ayala, “Timeframe”, 2016, in-situ installation at York St. Mary’s, York/UK.

As an interdisciplinary artist, I research in different genres the small gap between the composition and the decomposition of pictures, finding extraordinary transitions and transformations in the process.
By using up to 100.000 broken eggshells, I create a multitude of different shades of white in the exhibition space as rays of light will be broken at the innumerable sharp edges of the shells—a flittering magical moment, citing an optical phenomenon like the graphic alternation of light and dark in drawings or the pointillists’ refined approach to depicting light: a spatial painting.

The most important theme for this work, “Timeframe”, is the metamorphosis or transfiguration of the space. The piece is an ode to the beauty that is often hidden in the simple things. Moreover, it is to remind people that there is a beginning in every breaking – like in the metamorphosis of a butterfly. I, too, transfigure the space. To this end, I usually look for the strongest visual energy in a given space and either take it up or contrast it with an opposing energy. In this case, the hefty, dark, powerful and mystic Gothic architecture, loaded with history, is contrasted with the light, white, fragile and profane eggshells. Facing the massive white surface, the viewer is exposed to a strong physical sensation that stems from a mixture of power and powerlessness. This is a moment of holding your breath at first, of stopping in your tracks out of fear to break something on the one hand, and a bodily desire to step into the picture on the other; the sea of eggshells just seems to pull you in. Ultimately, it is a moment given away – the eggshells become vessels and start to fill with stories.

The other defining theme of the piece is time. The most inspiring aspect of York St. Mary’s, the venue for which the in-situ piece was devised, is that, over the centuries, countless people have walked through this building, each with their own unique history. These steps are embedded into the floor as permanent traces of time. In my work, the theme of time comprises the material itself—the eggshell—as well as the form that this material takes within the space. Symbolically, the eggshell embodies both birth and death. Re-contextualised, this everyday object becomes something sublime and aesthetic.
The exhibition space and my work interlock by telling their own respective stories. We live inside a jigsaw puzzle of pictures, bringing past-compositions to the present, but they are never real. The same holds true for our speculative view into the future. What is real, however, is our unprejudiced contemplation of a given object in the here and now—without resorting to projections from the past or interpolations of the future.

http://www.jlpz.de/

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