Description:
Using a yellowed page from a book as its base, the subject of this collage is a woman whose body is a light sketch and whose head is a black and white photograph. She sits with a closed book in her hand and her head tilted away from the viewer. This nonchalance is contrasted with stacks of books that are on fire, an echo to the title of the book page, L'Incendio Del Bosco or The Forest Fire. In Pereira's series, she prints this piece onto several book pages. Circular Ruins; "Las ruinas circulares"; Jorge Luis Borges; Ariadne
Label Text:
Mythology is Pereira’s muse, and her visual language coaxes stories from random imagery. Working primarily in collage, she allows associations to materialize serendipitously as she assembles elements from magazines and books. She works intuitively, maneuvering and repositioning her source material as various combinations begin to suggest emerging themes. “As soon as I started putting the figure together I knew it was Ariadne, and the rest fell into place pretty quickly,” she said about "Circular Ruins." “When I was happy with the image, I went looking for a title, and I of course went directly to Jorge Luis Borges (an Argentinian writer and poet, 1899–1986). I found the short story called the ‘Circular Ruins’ and as I read it I knew it was perfect.” In her visual reinterpretation of Borges’s story, Ariadne becomes the protagonist of a narrative that alludes to questions of self-perception, relationships, and enlightenment, in juxtaposition with reality, dreams, and magic.
Pereira recycles the original collaged imagery of "The Circular Ruins" as three photopolymer etchings. While she flattens and neutralizes the color through the printmaking process, she looks for new settings “using book pages as labyrinths.” Thus a series evolves that is technically on the edge between collage and print, giving a new twist to the ancient myth.
MW, 2014
Tags:
narrative; mythology; fires; women; text; books Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2013.04 |
