TEMPERLEY
Human nature
Control
Being human
Spaces
Imported desires
Suspended play
BIO/CV
ES
SUSPENDED PLAY
(2007-2009)Childhood and play appear in these works as territories of imagination and desire, shaped by the rules and limitations of the adult world.
Through photomontages, objects and installations, I construct scenarios where playfulness coexists with unease.
Through photomontages, objects and installations, I construct scenarios where playfulness coexists with unease.
Objects associated with play and care are transformed, becoming strange or inaccessible. That which should offer protection can become a threat. Play is thus suspended, caught between freedom and control.
TEXT BY HECTOR MEDICI
Curator of “Suspended play”
2008, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Every game, when it truly is one, demands from its players a certain degree of withdrawal, a disregard for the gaze of others. Children, and artists too (at least those who have not become excessively adapted), dispense with the presence of the observer in their practices; they would rather have one more player. There is no innocence in this demand: if the one who watches from the outside does not play, they are ultimately the distant spectator who, in the end, confirms the hierarchy of a world made to measure for vigilant adults and watched-over children. Games and art require a certain complicity.
Florencia Temperley, adopting a deliberately hospitable tone (in its most desolate sense), accommodates these “boys” and “girls”, drawn in barely perceptible lines of ink or sketched in charcoal, within aseptic spaces. The expressive media—large-format prints, photographs drawn from the visual repertoire of design and advertising, and graffiti from urban art—reinforce this detached and melancholic quality, through which our role as observers is called into question.
Because Florencia’s “creatures” suspend their games and look at us. They play at not playing, and by changing their status, they are the ones who subject us to the most intense questioning, the most profound demands. Even their toys seem to have undergone a strange mutation: the tenderness of the teddy bear turned into the violence of steel wool; the colours of balloons turned into black mourning; the swing reduced to pure orthopaedics... There is something brutal and incongruous in the forced merriment of the red nose and the silhouette of the Ferris wheel, set against the gaze of that girl dressed as a little clown. Her setting is no longer a pink, blue or yellow playroom, but a stripped-down room, devoid of doors and windows, subjected to the rigours of isolation and silence...
The white tree (of knowledge, perhaps?), which serves as both introduction and epilogue to the exhibition-installation, parodically constructed as a mechanical device and accompanied by fierce guard dogs, may not evoke the mythical Garden of Eden, the Lost Paradise of childhood, but rather that other promise of future happiness that these children glimpse in the strange games of grown-ups.