adn Cultura [Culture Section]

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Private Worlds

By Diana Fernández Irusta

From the LA NACION pressroom

  Images of a not so recent past radiate, ghostly, from the window display of Gachi Prieto Gallery to the streets of a Palermo neighborhood now in the twilight. 

“[…] the Timeline exhibition presented by Carolina Magnin at Gachi Prieto Gallery approaches the most emphatic past: the past of those who are no longer here. From a film shot between the 30s and the 40s, accidentally found in a family closet, the artist conceived an installation in which enlarged still frames, projections, digital traces of old analogical formats and objects from the past turn into a singular recreation of what she calls “the fragility of wee memory”.

In these evasive film reels, Magnin found uncles and grandparents in different gestures, movements, in family reunions and at the beach in a strangely modern Mar del Plata. Only during the opening, and thanks to a 16mm projector offered by Hayrabet Alacahan from Cineteca Vida, the film was viewed in its original version, with its texture, gaps and the typical jolting of those old projectors. The rest of the materials are a product of the digitalization of the movies.

 Magnin edited that “numeric” product, selected some still frames that were particularly mysterious –the evanescent face of her grandmother, the back-lit silhouette of an uncle, superimposed fragments of the sea-, she printed them on Duraclear sheets (the material used for X-ray plates) and placed them, for their exhibition, in old radiographic plate viewers.

 All the images are digitally colored by decision of the author, who was interested in signaling that there had been a passage from one support to another: an appropriation that inevitably produces as many prints as enigmas. As it happens when exercising memory, an archeology that is built from erratic clues, those mechanisms are recreated by Magnin’s poetics. “We are what we are because of the past that transcends us,” the artist reminds us. Like an echo, the recovered film images, projected on a sheet of frosted contact paper, travel around the gallery display and walk, smile or diffuse on the cars driving by on the street.

© LA NACION