TEMPERLEY
Human nature
Control
Being human
Spaces
Imported desires
Suspended play
BIO/CV
ES
IMPORTED DESIRES
(2012)Deseos importados was a group exhibition curated by Valeria González and presented at Galería Pasaje 17 in Buenos Aires.
My work explored the relationship between desire, consumption and nature through a series of photomontages, objects and textual pieces. In the photomontages, everyday consumer products are brought into unexpected contact with natural elements, creating imaginary associations that move between irony and poetic speculation.
A cake made of soil and grass, displayed on a traditional cake stand, played with the visual appeal of an object designed to be consumed, while subverting its promise of pleasure. In another work, a computer key marked CTRL, made from earth, introduced for the first time an image that I would revisit in later projects.
The exhibition also included a series of poems embroidered onto paper. I wanted to give the words a body, to make them physical. Beyond their material presence, the poems opened a space of resistance to the logic of capitalist consumption, bringing an intimate and personal dimension into the exhibition.
My work explored the relationship between desire, consumption and nature through a series of photomontages, objects and textual pieces. In the photomontages, everyday consumer products are brought into unexpected contact with natural elements, creating imaginary associations that move between irony and poetic speculation.
A cake made of soil and grass, displayed on a traditional cake stand, played with the visual appeal of an object designed to be consumed, while subverting its promise of pleasure. In another work, a computer key marked CTRL, made from earth, introduced for the first time an image that I would revisit in later projects.
The exhibition also included a series of poems embroidered onto paper. I wanted to give the words a body, to make them physical. Beyond their material presence, the poems opened a space of resistance to the logic of capitalist consumption, bringing an intimate and personal dimension into the exhibition.
TEXT BY EDUARDO MEDICI
Curator of the exhibition at Festival de la Luz (Festival of light)
2010, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In today's art world, it is common to encounter young artists, as well as those who are not so young, who, upon realizing that found imagery brings them some form of recognition from the art establishment (sales, awards, reviews, publications, etc.), begin to repeat it until it becomes a boring and predictable cliché. Florencia Temperley seems to move in the opposite direction, preferring to take risks in search of other paths.
In these new photographs, the objectification of the world that emerged from the dialogue between childhood and play has given way to a new way of looking at that world, now entirely stripped bare, “devoid of doors and windows, subjected to the rigour of isolation and silence” (1).
But in art there are no breaks, only continuities or reorganizations. Thus, although at first glance there seems to be no connection whatsoever with the previous work, and the response to these pieces is one of bewilderment — since nothing is as it was, and the space that once housed childhood fantasies, now unpopulated, is more aseptic than ever — if the viewer's gaze slowly manages to enter this fractal dimension of objects, and this iterative use of the fragment, which the artist employs to transform that space into this quasi-abstract, white and minimalist environment, they will discover, in one of its many windows, a tiny head; they will see some transgenic little animal crossing a wall, and even a papier-mâché deer standing guard over the exhibition room.
Florencia was once asked how it had all begun. “With a game,” she replied. And she went on building little houses with Rasti.
Eduardo Medici
(1) Héctor Medici, in a text from 2009.