Glendalys Medina
Colin Snapp
Galleria 1/9unosunove is pleased to announce the exhibitions by Glendalys Medina and Colin Snapp.
Glendalys Medina (Puerto Rico, 1979)
Glendalys Medina is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist that examines cultural systems, psychology, repetition, and self-transformation. The Shank is a project in which she documents and teaches herself MCing, breakdancing, DJing and writing graffiti, in other words, the elements of Hip-Hop. She began The Shank to discover her hidden potential to become and do anything she desires through practice and resolve. A ‘shank’ is a slang term for a handmade knife commonly made in prisons or impoverished neighborhoods. By cutting out a new identity for herself she serves as a model for others to escape confinement, discover one’s true self and recreate one’s identity.
The work presented here is related to graffiti. ‘Cut Project’ documents her first time tagging at Gagosian Gallery in New York. ‘BlackGold Video Tag Diary’ is a compilation of videos she made to be viewed online. They document her posting her signature tag ‘BlackGold’. The drawings belong to a series called ‘Alphabet Series’. Each drawing is of a letter in her stylized alphabet. She uses two stencils as lines to construct the composition of each letter: ‘BlackGold: Outline’ and ‘BlackKraft: Outline’. Their composition is a rearrangement of the basic shapes from the face of a boombox, Hip-Hop’s quintessential image. During the opening night, Glendalys Medina will perfome by posing her signature on the gallery walls.
Colin Snapp (Lopez Island WA, 1982)
In a world where technology relegates us to the status of objects -”observers observed”-, where ordinary experience is so infiltrated with media, isolating organic life moments becomes on one hand a keepsake, and on the other hand the spectacle of visibility of growth, something utterly distanced from participatory involment. It has been said that one of the functions of art is to critically disrupt the seeming transparency between viewers and objects viewed and Colin Snapp, with his series called TC Studies, wants to question whether images can preserve the vital presence of what they necessarily represent.
These images are derived from video footage of various plant species. The artist produced these works by photographing the LCD screen (view finder) of his video camera and printing the image of the 3inch screen at a significantly magnified proportion. This process came about as a by product from the Panorama project in which Colin Snapp spent a month filming within national parks. Much of the footage ended up being of visitors experiencing these national parks through their cameras. In a sense the view finder has become a sort of third eye and within these natural landscapes becomes very apparent. What might otherwise be documentary realism, plain and simple, translates into commentary on the contemporary technologies by which we take in the world, thus labeling it and reducing it to the status of a commodity.
For any further information please contact:
gallery@unosunove.com