Artworks
Belén Rodríguez
Mixtilínea
27 November 2009 – 20 January 2010
Josh Lilley Gallery is delighted to announce the opening of the exhibition Mixtilinea, the first UK show by the Spanish installation artist Belén.
Incorporating various projections, kinetic installation, and interactive paper based work, Belén will fill all four distinct gallery spaces with an ephemeral and intimate presentation of works that are intrinsically linked to notions of time: of time passing, of instruments that record personal experience, of observation and voyage, and a broader comment focusing on the banality present within everyday life.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is Timeline, representing a journey followed by the artist over a typical day in Valladolid. During a set 24-hour period, Belén took a photograph of where she was every five minutes, having the floor line as the connecting thread in the pictures' succession. The images are then printed composing a panorama that surrounds a miniature railway track. Through the tiny camera that is built onto it, a reconstructed toy train moves around the track recording a photographic montage. A tunnel is built on the track to reflect the hours when the artist was asleep. It transmits a three minute film on a loop to a projector that will beam the sequence onto the facade of the gallery — being visible both inside and out.
While visually and aesthetically engaging in its own right, intricately made and painstakingly put together, Timeline's focus is on the relationship between symbolic and real space during the course of one day. Like the blank areas between the numbers on a clock, Belén's train and the distance it covers allow us to reflect on how we have intuitively assimilated in our minds a relationship between actual space and time. This desire to record personal experience is extended in Swiss Notebook. Based upon an ordering and reconfiguration of found images and materials, the work alludes to a preoccupation we have in the habitual collection of objects, at the same time highlighting our need to compartmentalise our own daily lives.
Belén (b. 1981, Valladolid, Spain) lives and works in Vienna. Recent group exhibitions include Second Hand at Engholm Engelhorn Galerie, Vienna, Generacion at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, and Next Reality at Yokohama Creative City Centre, Yokohama, Japan in 2009. In 2006 she presented the solo exhibition Mirar la realidad no directamente, at Estampa Art Gallery, Madrid.