WaterLINE: Porto Alegre - New York
Queens Museum of Art, NY (2010 – 2011). Curated by Hitomi Iwasaki. Drawing installation, 1500 square feet.
About the work I Text by Diana Marcela Cárdenas, for ArtNexus Magazine (Bogotá, Colombia)
access here for the full review.
Artist Claudia Vieras’s work revolves around the notion of making metaphorically evident the experience of living in a given space and time. WaterLINE is the title of the work on exhibit at the Queens Museum, in New York City. The project combines performance art and drawing, resulting in a conceptual work of art of abstract figurativism.
Viera begins her project creating an installation by means of a performance effort, where her only tool is a permanent marker—with the purpose of leaving indelible traces of a subtle work—and her main materials her own body and the architectural space. The artist developed her performance between late February and May 16, when the exhibition opened to the public.
Slowly, as in an act of meditation, Viera began to create a continuous line starting at the intersection of two perpendicular walls and the gallery’s ceiling and growing clockwise in a spiral, in an expansive movement towards the exterior. In this way, Viera traces inside the museum a hypothetical journey following the Atlantic coastline from Porto Alegre, Brazil (her native city) to Brooklyn, New York (where she currently lives).
Thus, Viera creates an installation about the abstraction of time: the ceiling and walls of a 1,500-square feet gallery are covered by the spiral shape, and the viewer is submerged in a moment of self-awareness through the collapse of the notions of perspective, scale, interior, and exterior aperture. With this intentional act, Viera creates a space to be shared with the public; the sole pattern of her continuous line transforms a common space into a vertiginous, complex one where the different dimensions of what is perceived by the human eye intertwine to create articulation and disarticulation of space. Similarly, with this continuous line, the artist creates a unique concept of drawing: not the sketching of an idea nor the representation of an object, but a register of lived time, a trace of the passage of time.
Viera’s act of performance intends to leave the viewers with, on the one hand, the particular concept of a drawing created through meditation, like a mapping or representation of the passage of time, and, on the other, ways of exploring and interacting, on the part of the viewer themselves, with space.
As it deals with topics such as time and space in connection with the artist’s life, the WaterLINE series remains an unfinished project, transitory, and in permanent transformation, according to the time and place when it is performed.
The WaterLINE project is closely linked to Topografías, another project in progress where, since 2002, Viera has recorded experiences of time and space and examined the relationship between people and their environment. The concept of a single continuous line has been deployed by Viera in previous projects such as (Kioto) a video performance created in a residential space in Japan, and a different version of (NY-Utica), among others.
Text by Diana Marcela Cárdenas, for ArtNexus Magazine (No 78, Volume 9, Year 2010)
