"Is It The Fear Of Forgetting That Triggers The Desire To Remember, Or Is It Perhaps The Other Way Around?"

Leo Gabin

Installation view, Independent Brussels, 2016 

"In this age of the excessive use of images, for us it’s now more relevant than ever to use found footage and recycled imagery. Especially with an abundance of amateurish made “private” imagery put readily available online, the idea of authorship becomes even more questionable. But raising this question can be seen as the essence of the work."

-Leo Gabin, Modern Matter, June 2013

Now well known on the contemporary art scene, the Leo Gabin collective is interested in the thousands of images that form our visual and virtual, common and quotidian landscape. Internet represents a window onto the world where images of all kinds circulate and cohabit, providing a mass of information that must be deciphered. By appropriating these visions, the collective creates new works that capture this incessant movement on canvas, in silkscreen prints, videos and installations. Today, when everybody is an author and is helping enrich this virtual universe, the works of art elaborated by the trio attain a new dimension. 

In them, techniques and materials combine yet always leave the original image, the creative source, visible. Leo Gabin is particularly interested in American culture, so important in the three artists’ young years. It stages the stereotypes, excesses and paradoxes to which it can give rise. 

https://contemporary-art.mirabaud.com/en/artists/detail/leo-gabin

Further on Grand Ave, 2016,

Lacquer and acrylic on aluminum,

75 5/8 x 53 1/8 inches (192 x 135 cm)

At It Again, 2014 Lacquer, spray paint, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas 205 x 150 cm (80.71 x 59.06 in)

Do Ho Suh

Staircase-III, 2010. Do Ho Suh is a South Korean artist who works primarily in sculpture, installation, and drawing. Suh is well known for re-creating architectural structures and objects using fabric in what the artist describes as an "act of memorialization."  Is home a place, a feeling, or an idea? Suh asks timely questions about the enigma of home, identity and how we move through and inhabit the world around us.

Chiharu Shiota

"Everything I create is from a personal experience but I want to extend it into something universal." Stepping into one of Chiharu Shiota’s striking installations is like entering an alternate reality: the materials and objects feel familiar, but the logic behind the intricate web structures seem to stem from an unknowable realm. Enveloped in an elaborate web of yarn, you’re left with a subtle, indescribable imprint on the body and mind.

The Key in the Hand, 2015. Installation: old keys, wooden boats, red wool. Japan Pavilion at 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy  For the 56th Venice Biennale, Shiota unveiled ‘The Key in the Hand' (2015), a piece created for the Japanese pavilion. In this installation, 180,000 keys gathered through an open call were suspended from dense webs of red yarn, which linked the gallery space to two wooden boats on the floor. A photograph of a child holding a key was displayed alongside four monitors featuring videos of young children talking about memories before and after they were born. For the artist, keys are a personal object that simultaneously keeps our space safe on a daily basis and has the potential to unlock doors to new, unknown worlds. The keys dangling from thousands of red strings evoked a sense of intercon-nectedness and expansiveness, allowing viewers to imbue their own memories and associations to the familiar everyday item. 

Counting Memories, 2019. Installation: wooden desks, chairs, paper, black wool. Muzeum Śląskie w Katowicach, Katowice, Poland For ‘Counting Memories’ (2019), an installation shown at Muzeum Śląskie in Katowice, Poland, the artist envisioned a network of black yarn extending from the ceiling to be a night sky, or a universe, filled with white numbers dotting the space like stars. The piece invited viewers to sit at desks (also entangled in black yarn) where they had the opportunity to answer questions and contemplate the significance of numbers in their lives: Numbers that have special meaning, numbers in the form of dates, numbers connected to personal histories. As with many of her works, the installation attempted to make visible the invisible threads shaping our inner and outer lives.

Chiharu Shiota – A Room of Memorya, 2009, old wooden windows, group exhibition Hundred Stories about Love, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan

Enrica Casentini

Open Doors

The door is a symbol of border, of passage from a dimension to another one, from inside to outside.It can be open or closed.From the door to the house, an intimate space of identification, from house to city, extensive space of passage or stay where peoples, races and religions live together.Sometimes it's more difficult to open own doors. In this work I wanted to represent the individual and his will to open. Houses, like individuals, are many and different from each other. All doors are open to signify the choice of every individual, they rapesent the human will to open to exchange. For this reason the title of my work is "the open doors", it's my strong opinion that doors and borders can became place of exchange not of division.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, and the Unmade House

Matta-Clark understood the emotional impact buildings have on people. In a 1976 notebook entry, he expressed his goal to “transform a location into a mental state.” This link between a home and its residents was reflected in the letters he received after the reveal of Splitting.

Although the home was viewed as a private space, families were also urged to participate in neighborhood networks that valued conformity. These connections were presented as key to the "good life." Matta-Clark examined the motivations behind the creation and promotion of this ideal, questioning whose interests it truly served.

Instead of viewing architecture as a solution to housing issues—having witnessed the effects of post-war developments first-hand—Matta-Clark used architecture as a medium for sculpture, bringing the cuts of buildings to life in his photographs. The act of transforming abandoned buildings and documenting the process was central to his practice, as was the social commentary expressed through the boldness of these transformative actions.

Marlene MacCallum - Book Works

Recording my visible environment and ordinary occurrences of daily life has been the persistent pursuit of my practice. I am fascinated by our relationship with the spaces that frame and objects that fill most daily lives, and yet, are overlooked as we move through our routines in a state of inattentional blindness.

Do Not Enter, partially expanded view, 18 × 23 × 80 cm (extended), 1998. This is a tunnel book that leads you through contradictory experiences of a text which attempts to deny entrance and images that beckon by offering passageways. It obliquely refers to the absurdity of attempting to define territory.

Obvert, hand bound bookwork with accordion structure, photogravure and letterpress, 28.5 × 21 × 1 cm (closed) and 43 × 140 cm (expanded), 1997.

In this work, I am exploring how the ordinary can so easily become the extraordinary. Initially, the images and text describe a childhood memory of interior space inverting but then as one moves through the book and closer to the spaces, the shift between normal and odd occurs via representations of tactile sensations.

Details of pink story: sinistral, opening the book work and fully opened view, 96 × 122 cm (expanded size), 2004—05.

This two-volume collaborative work with Barb Hunt brings together two seemingly contradictory representations of a woman's life. pink story: dextral is an artificially constructed narrative of a stereotypical woman's life. Paint chips offer the promise of covering flaws, and the paint surface creates a façade. In contrast to this external perspective, pink story: sinistral presents an internalized story; constructed of photographs that represent spaces metaphoric of key stages in a woman's life. The use of the tile format in both volumes links the pieces together formally, and the visual narratives become mosaics. The result is two volumes that are like mirror images, reflecting each other, and offering to the viewer a paradoxical reality.

Townsite House, 25.3 × 25.3 cm (page size), 2006. The Townsite House Project is a two-part body of work consisting of a series of 34 toned, fibre-based silver gelatin prints and a book work. The project was inspired by the experience in living in Corner Brook’s Townsite area. Four models of homes were built in the 1920-30’s by the pulp and paper mill for their management and skilled labour. I photographed in five homes – all the same model as the one I live in. I wanted to provide a reading experience that would give the visual equivalence of the uncanny experience of being in homes that are the same/not the same as mine. The book work makes use of a mediated process of representation. Using photogravure, film transparencies, screenprinting and letterpress, the hand bound book work layers and mirrors images and text to echo the architectural palimpsest. The videos of the maquettes provide information on the evolution of the structure and content of the book work.

Glaze: Reveal:, 21 × 42 cm, 2013.

Glaze: Reveal and Veiled is one of a series of book works inspired by the experience of living in Corner Brook’s Townsite area on the west coast of the island of Newfoundland. Between 1924-34 the pulp mill built 150 homes to house the mill management and skilled labourers. Over a period of 10 years, I have photographed in several homes, all the same model as the one I live in. These homes vary in condition from close to original in design and décor to highly renovated. This project gave me the rare opportunity to record the evolution of interior aspects of these homes. It has been the context to explore the paradoxical phenomena of conformity and individualization that occurs in a company town. Having grown up in a suburban housing development, my earliest memories of home is that of living in a space that is reminiscent of my neighbors’. Each artist’s book explores a distinct facet of image memory, multiplicity, sequence and offers the viewer a visual equivalence of the uncanny. Glaze: Reveal and Veiled presents 24 images of Townsite windows grouped into two distinct sequences. The structure is a dos à dos and each side offers a different visual metaphor for memory. The closed book is contained within a wrapper and the viewer has the option of choosing which side to enter first. Each begins similarly with endpapers made from scans of window curtains followed by line drawings of the window frames as the graphic for the title pages. Moving into Glaze: Reveal, the viewer is presented with a spread consisting of a blank white space on the verso and dense black on the recto. Turning the page, the next spread presents an image of a window on the verso and a dense black field on the recto with a glimmer of light appearing. As the viewer continues to move through the pages, each spread reveals a new window image that has been visually peeled away from the densely layered recto. The layering slowly becomes visible revealing the final presentation of single images. In contrast, moving into Glaze: Veiled the viewer begins with a window image that is layered with the previous title page line drawing. In the next spread, the same window is presented alone on the verso. The recto side layers the previous images as well as introducing the upcoming image. The viewer experiences a visual déjà vu each time the pages turn. The progress through the work results in ever more layered and veiled images.

Glaze: Veiled: , 21 × 42 cm, 2013

Romana Ruban - JONAS

Jonas or The artist at work  is written by Albert Camus. Plot of this story is about impossible, the desire to create, searching himself in painting, problems in relationships and sacrificing himself to his family and creations. It`s all about tragedy of artist`s life. I had faced with objective to include hand-printed illustrations with some transformation and performance of  page`s ply. I hope that I made it as well as I planned. All illustrations are made in etсhing and aquatint - strong and simple graphic technique, that’s why reader will not go under unnecessary imposed associations and details. Characters was depicted with linear emotional drawing, it`s contrasted with text about false coloured life of painter. Bookcover is covered with blank white canvas, it`s describes last significant painting of Jonas. Main illustration is in the middle of the book block. It is façade of windows. Different moments of artist`s life  are arranged in every window. Reader can put book and transform illustration like a yard. Then viewer can pry for artist like unfriendly neighbors. Reader can observe all happiness and misery of artist`s family. This is studying project includes illustrations, page-proofs and book binding.

Niklas Roy

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/02/niklas-roy-little-piece-privacy/

Berlin-based artist Niklas Roy isn’t just concerned about his privacy and protection online. To stop passersby from peeping into his workshop, he strung up a white, lace curtain stretching only partially across his window.  Titled “My Little Piece of Privacy,” the ironic project from 2010 was established to offer seclusion to the artist, while recording those who walked past his space. Each outside movement triggers a motor to position the thin fabric in front of the person attempting to look inside.

Pablo Rasgado

Within Pablo Rasgado’s Work, the surfaces of the walls often are the detonators of his research, which are revealed as evidence of complex situations that lie underneath them, and by doing so, they highlight features of the site that usually remain invisible.  His interventions in urban spaces draw their conclusions, by the information gathered though the study of the accumulated social experience within an architectural setting. They try to place the attention towards an inquiry about history, function and form by questioning the relationship between function and design within specific contexts; the analysis of urban change and its cultural value; and the potential of inactive spaces within cities.

Pablo Rasgado, Mural , 2019, Construction materials from the demolition of a house, 244 x 760 cm.

Pablo Rasgado’s work transforms ordinary materials from public and institutional spaces into compelling abstract compositions. By reappropriating fragments of painted walls—whether from city streets or temporary museum installations—he captures layers of visual and social history embedded in these surfaces. His approach preserves the essence of a moment, frozen in time, yet recontextualized. Rasgado’s Unfolded Architecture series, for instance, abstracts specific moments in museum and art history, echoing a conceptual homage to Mexican muralism. Rather than illustrating historical scenes, Rasgado utilizes fragments of everyday walls, rich with contextual layers, to create abstractions that resonate with historical depth. Through this innovative reuse of space’s “background” materials, Rasgado forges a direct connection to Mexico’s artistic past, infusing his work with the physical residue of lived experiences and cultural narratives.

Pablo Rasgado, When the symbols shatter, 2019, Structure in wood, light, and acrylic, 144 x 62 x 14 in., 366 x 158 x 36 cm.

Pablo Rasgado, Ventana, 2019, Bricks, 52 x 66 in., 133 x 168 cm.