Teresa Ascencao, Maria
On the Cusp…
Teresa Ascenção, Antonio Nuñez, Marcela Trujillo
A Space Main Gallery
February 21 – March 29, 2003
Opening February 21, 2003, 7:00 pm–9:00 pm
Working with themes of pop culture and consumerism, fantasy, sexual and religious taboos, the artists in this exhibition have each depicted and constructed images reflecting personal experiences and responses to cultural phenomena.
Lenticular technology, commonly used to produce religious souvenir cards, and at one time used in vintage 3D postcards or motion cards, makes up Teresa Ascenção’s photo-based series Maria. A comic exploration of women’s sexuality within Roman Catholicism, Ascenção uses her mother’s Portuguese Azorean upbringing to explore this subject. A female doll is used as the prime character dressed in historic folk costumes and placed within domestic settings. These scenes challenge the traditional female role by introducing potential taboo sexual encounters. Sequential photographs are taken of the dolls to produce humorous and playfully shocking animated scenes.
Antonio Nuñez’s installation at the gallery consists of boxes in different sizes and harmonic scale, containing canvases inspired by glamorous decorative wrapping paper. Nuñez states that “…with painting, one can disguise, deceive and simulate what we dislike and what is attractive.” The artist takes imagery from childhood to pornography in the attempt to seduce and deceive. He is concerned with and critiques the invasion of advertisement and publicity into the personal, and all aspects of life, including art.
Using an expansive visual reference of images from scientific illustrations to textile design, Marcela Trujillo creates environments rich in multi-cultural patterns. Large, vibrant and busy canvases, detailed with figures, places and symbols, form a network of personal fantasies rendered as organic-ornamental illustrations. Space, form and colour are constructed around mass media and popular culture. Identifiable objects, symbols and figures are dropped into an unexpected context. Comic book heroes, historical structures such as buildings and statues, time periods and images from nature, are juxtaposed. The characters are fixed, yet seem to float within a bizarre, confusing but mesmerizing space a depiction of many worlds of fantasy.
Antonio Nunez
Marcela Trujillo
Biographies
A graduate of the University of Toronto, Teresa Ascenção is based in Toronto.
Teresa Ascenção’s work was produced with the support of the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.
Antonio Nuñez studied at the Professional School of Art in Camagüey and the Higher Institute of Art in La Habana, Cuba. He comes from a new generation of Cuban artists who have travelled and exhibited internationally. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, presently conducting a residency in Aachen, Germany.
He is concerned with and critiques the invasion of advertisement and publicity into the personal, and all aspects of life, including art.
Marcela Trujillo has exhibited extensively throughout Chile and has recently begun a promising career in the visual arts in New York City where she presently lives and works.
Trujillo is currently producing a comic strip that is published every two weeks in a newspaper in Chile. The stories are based on a character from her painting Maliki 4 eyes.